Now and in the Hour of Our Death (25 page)

Other plans? If Smiley only knew. “Sorry, sir.” Davy swallowed, tugged on the hem of his coat, and limped along the corridor.

It was dark inside the broom closet, but he'd done this so often he could find his gear blindfolded. He took out a wheeled, galvanized bucket with rollers on its rim, put some detergent into the bucket and a capful of Dettol. The disinfectant's pungent smell would hang in the corridor for hours, mingling with the rank odour of infrequently washed bodies. God, but it would be good to breathe fresh air again. He grabbed a floor mop. “I'll need to get water, Mr. Smiley.”

“We've not moved the tap since the last time you done this.”

Davy filled the bucket, stuck the mop into the soapy water, and, pushing the bucket ahead of him, began to swab the corridor floor. The grey concrete, raddled with cracks like the strands of a spider's web, disappeared under the bubbles.

Mr. Smiley wandered over and stood beside Davy. Good. He'd been told to get close to the guard, keep him chatting.

“Did you get to the match yesterday, Mr. Smiley?”

“I did so. I took my boys. I thought you said Celtic was going to win.” Smiley grinned. “They lost. Three to none.”

“Och,” Davy said, “you can't win them all.”

“The way they're playing this year, they'll not win any. They'll not even beat Bangor next Saturday, and Bangor's been playing like a crowd from the home for the disabled.” Mr. Smiley leaned against the corridor wall, one booted foot on the concrete.

Davy noticed that the lace of one of the guard's boots hadn't been threaded through all of the eyeholes.

“Linfield's at Glentoran next week, and me and my boys've tickets for that one, too, so we have.”

Davy wondered if Mr. Smiley would ever get to that game. He'd be up to his neck in the post-breakout enquiry. He might even lose his job. That would be a shame, but when it came to Mr. Smiley's job or Davy's interests, there'd be no contest. What if the stupid bugger did try to put up a fight? Davy could feel the weight of the gun in his pocket. Could he use it?

George Smiley had a couple of boys. He was always going on about them. He'd chunter on about the mischief they'd got themselves into mitching apples, how the older one played inside-right for his grammar school's soccer eleven, how much they liked their da to take them to a game, kick a ball about with them.

Those boys would need their da, just like the two wee girls in Fiona's elementary class had needed theirs. But their father, a ticket collector at the Queen's Quay Station in Belfast, had been ripped apart by one of Davy's bombs, and it was no use telling himself that he'd only built it, that he hadn't set it. Fiona hadn't made any distinction. As far as she'd been concerned, Davy might as well have lit the fuse himself. She'd been right. She'd said, “I can't go on living with you, Davy. Not unless you leave the Provos,” her voice as cold as that damp February night in 1974.

He shivered and rubbed his thigh, feeling the cold of the weapon in his pocket. Davy could see that Mr. Smiley was looking at him questioningly. Let him. Davy didn't want to come back to the present. He wanted to remember how he'd talked her out of leaving, made gentle love to her on their old sofa. He didn't want to remember how, ever since that night, there'd been a new hardness in her, and how the thoughts of those wee fatherless girls had torn at something inside him, too. It was then he knew he'd started to question the rightness of the Cause, a question to which he'd found an answer shortly after being shut in this fucking place.

The Nationalists
were
right, always had been right in what they wanted. He'd never stopped believing that, but killing innocent people would never free Ireland. Not if a half a million died. Shooting people's relatives and friends wasn't going to make them more tolerant of the other side. You couldn't bomb folks into loving their neighbours. If that was what fighting for the Cause meant, he wanted no more part of it. He'd accepted responsibility for what he and his bombs had done, knew he could never wash away the stains. Him and Pontius Pilate. They made a right pair.

Davy glanced up and saw that Mr. Smiley had been keeping pace and was now directly beside him. “You're quiet the day, Davy.”

“Och, there's days you don't feel much like talking.” To anybody. Here he was, having spent the last nine years keeping his distance from the hard bastards like Brendan McGuinness, right up to his ears working for the Provos again and about to pull a gun on this man. What the hell was there to talk about?

“I hear you,” Smiley said, softly. “The days can be hard on a man in here.”

I don't want your shitty sympathy, Davy thought. He'd promised Eamon that whatever had to be done would be, but if things did get sweaty, he wondered if in the heat of the moment his resolve might crumble, but if it had to be him or Smiley—Davy shook his head. He wanted no more deaths to his account, even if there were enough in his past to ensure that when he appeared before the judgment seat—if there was one, if there was an all-forgiving God, which he doubted—he, Davy McCutcheon, was already bound straight for hell. He'd not have to make the trip to purgatory. He was there already, because Eamon was relying on him again, just like the time he'd wanted a chisel.

Christ Almighty, Davy told himself, running the soapy mop through the wringers on the bucket, cursing as dirty water splattered his pants' legs, why had keeping his word always been so important to him? Still was important? Well, why shouldn't a killer have integrity? Davy had no difficulty thinking of himself as a killer, not since the ticket collector, not since the little girl he'd stood and watched being cremated in a car blown up by the bomb he'd made and planted with his own hands. He could hear her screams yet. The night he'd killed her and the rest of her family, he'd recognized that he wasn't a soldier, as much as he'd wanted to believe that he was. He'd been forced to accept that building bombs for others to use did not absolve him of responsibility for their use.

He stopped mopping and reminded himself his job was to talk to Mr. Smiley, not rehash all that was done and over.

What the hell was he meant to chat about? Would somebody for Christ's sake hurry up and give the code word? Say something, he told himself. Anything. “Do you know, Mr. Smiley,” he muttered, “some days it's a good idea to take my oul' da's advice.”

“About what?”

Davy mopped his way closer to the guard. “About some days it's better to keep your trap shut and let people think you're a bit thick…”

“… Than open it and remove any doubt.” Smiley laughed. “That one has whiskers.”

And Davy would have a new crop of whiskers if the buggers running this thing didn't get a move on. In spite of himself, his hand dropped to his thigh and fondled the gun.

Smiley bent over, staring at where Davy's hand rested. The guard's voice was solicitous. “The ould leg playing up, Davy?”

“Aye. It gets a bit stiff now and again.”

“I could ask the doctor for to have a look.”

More bloody sympathy. Dammit, he liked Smiley. Davy forced a laugh. “Sure that fellah doesn't know his arse from his elbow.”

“Do you want to take a wee breather?”

“That's very decent of you, sir”—Smiley was a decent man—“but I'll keep going.” Holy Mother of God, he was going to pull a gun on this man, and all his kindness made the prospect more repulsive with every second. Killing strangers had been bad enough. Putting a gaping hole in the man he'd talked to nearly every day for nine years—Davy slammed the mop into the bucket, hauled it out, and swabbed on along the corridor.

He looked up to see Sean Donovan leaning against his cell doorway, arms folded on his chest. Donovan was a big man. He exercised in the prison gymnasium. Veins like small hosepipes ran down the fronts of his overdeveloped biceps. One arm bore a tattoo, an Irish harp and underneath the motto, “
Éireann go Brách.
” The other was adorned with a naked-breasted woman and the motto, “Erin go braless.” He winked at Davy, who wanted to be as close to this cell as possible.

“If you don't mind, Mr. Smiley, I'll take that wee rest now.”

“Go ahead. Do you want me to get Donovan there to finish up for you?”

It was the last thing Davy wanted. “Och, no, sir. I'll be all right in a minute.”

“Fair enough.”

Davy leaned against the cell wall, hand inside his trousers' pocket seeming to massage his leg as his fingers curled round the gun's butt. He heard voices yelling from somewhere.

“Jesus,” said Mr. Smiley, “would you listen to that bloody racket? Just because some bugger wants a floor polisher.”

Davy heard the shout by one man taken up and repeated by others. “Bumper,” they were yelling. “Bumper.”

 

CHAPTER 22

TYRONE. SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1983

Judging by the way the brambles bent under the weight of fruit, there was going to be a bumper crop this year. Erin plucked two of the riper blackberries and popped them in her mouth. They were tart on her tongue and suited her bitter mood. She took little pleasure from the lack of breeze down here in the hollow behind the back gate of the farmyard or from the sun warming the back of her neck.

That sun would speed the berries' ripening, and in a week they'd be ready for plucking and she should make blackberry jam. The pounds of sugar she'd need were ready in a kitchen cupboard, but she had other plans for it now. Sammy would need them to mix with fertilizer to make the explosive ammonal.

If she had been going to make jam, she'd have boiled the fruit and the sugar in the same big pot that her grandmother, and her mother, and Erin had all used. Cal and Fiach loved her jams.

Fiach was dead, dead as the empty place inside where he had lived, laughing, and singing, and sometimes crying, growing to his young manhood. He'd only been sixteen. Sixteen with all his life ahead of him, until that life had been snuffed out by the British.

And for what, she asked, for what? For Ireland, that's what. Da would have been proud of his youngest son. Poor Fiach. Was it only a couple of weeks ago that he'd taken his shotgun here and Tessie with him to chase the rabbits out of these same brambles?

The bushes grew on a low mound in the hollow, and to the unsuspecting eye it was but one of several ordinary, low, bracken, and bramble-covered hillocks. What lay under the mound made it special.

She breathed in the scent of hay lying mown and ready for baling in the next field. From above she heard the sweet, sharp song of a skylark.

She looked up into the bowl of the sky and watched the bird climbing, higher, higher. Perhaps she had been wrong to dismiss the Christianity that had been drilled into her by the nuns at the parochial school. Perhaps there was a heaven and Fiach's soul had soared to it faster than the skylark was rising above her.

Erin wanted to believe in it, but in her heart she could not. She could remember the words, learned by rote so long ago,
Requiescat in pace
, Fiach; may he rest in peace. But her faith? Gone. Long gone. Fiach was dead and she had to face that squarely—and get on with preparing things for the living, for Eamon and the men he'd bring with him, and for the attack that would be her vengeance for her lost brother.

And it wasn't simply revenge she wanted. Hitting the Security Forces when they least expected it would drive home the message that as long as the Irish demanded their freedom, the British and the Loyalists could never win the fight to keep the Six Counties. She knew the raid she was planning wouldn't be the one to finish the war, but how much longer could the English go on suffering casualties, spending millions of pounds? One day they would be gone forever, and on that day, Fiach's sacrifice would have meaning, and in that meaning she would find a measure of peace.

She turned in a full circle, one last survey to make sure no one was watching her before she dropped to all fours and crawled along an animal track beneath the briars. She swore as a thorn pricked her hand. She heard something rustling through the undergrowth and listened intently. The noise wasn't loud enough to be caused by a large animal like a fox or a badger. It would be a rabbit scampering away, fearful for its life, white scut held high. That was the way she wanted the British to scuttle off, but she wanted them to go with their tails between their legs.

The light was dim under the thick bushes, the sunlight dappling the brown earth. Ahead, she could make out the low entrance to the old neolithic passage grave.

Erin squeezed through the narrow opening. The dark closed round her, and she waved her hand in front of her face until she felt a string dangling from the roof. One quick tug and a lightbulb glowed. Now she could see yellow cables coming out of the earth from where Cal and Fiach had run the electrical supply along a shallow trench from the barn.

The passage, the feature that gave the construction its modern name, was lined and roofed with stone slabs. The cables were fixed with staples to one wall. There was four feet of clearance between the earth floor and the roof. Erin felt the chill in the air, smelled the musty odour of damp and spiders. Despite the chill, her hands began to sweat.

She'd been terrified of insects as a child, felt hemmed in by enclosed spaces, but she stifled her fear and hurried forward on all fours, the light from the tunnel partly blocked by her body. Strands of gossamer stuck to her face. She ripped them away with one hand. She hated being in the tunnel, but she was doing this for Eamon. She offered a spoken prayer to the Madonna in whom she could not believe, “Mother of God, keep him safe and bring him back to me. Please.”

She left the confined tunnel and stood upright in the grave's main chamber. A second string hung to the left of the entrance. When she pulled it, two sixty-watt bulbs illuminated the room. The light made her claustrophobia easier to bear.