Now and in the Hour of Our Death (59 page)

He watched the wagon skid to a stop, the driver's door open, and McGuinness struggle out, dragging a little girl by one of her pigtails. The child was in tears. McGuinness hauled her over to Davy.

“Get that fucking van started. There's only me coming. The rest's shot. It was an ambush.” His voice trembled. “And if they'd known to look out for the tractor, they'd've had the number of this car. I'd never've got through the border, so I grabbed this wee one for a hostage. They had to let me through.”

“Are you being followed?”

“No fuckin' way. The Brits can't cross the border, and I told the Gardai to stay put for fifteen minutes, or this one”—he jabbed the gun muzzle under the child's chin—“gets hers.”

The girl howled, and McGuinness snarled, “Shut the fuck up.”

“Let her go,” Davy said quietly. “Let her go.”

“I will not.” McGuinness tightened his grip on her arm. “She's old enough to get the number of the van and tell the Gardai. We need the van to get to Sean's people in Castlefinn. You'd feel fucking stupid if we got picked up between here and there.” He kept glancing over his shoulder as if expecting pursuers to appear at any second.

Davy tried to keep his voice level. “Christ, Brendan, it's only ten miles. If we go right now, leave her here, it'll take her a fair while to walk back to the Gardai post. By the time they…”

“I'm taking no chances.” McGuinness screamed and pushed the child from him.

Davy caught his breath as she landed on her knees in the gravel. He started to move to her to pick her up but was halted by McGuinness's yell of, “Stay where you are.”

As Davy turned, he heard the “snick” as McGuinness released the rifle's safety catch and saw him tuck its butt into his shoulder. Mother of God, he was going to shoot her. “Brendan, for fuck's sake, there's no need for that.” Davy positioned himself between the child and McGuinness. He could see death staring at him from the ArmaLite's muzzle. “Put the fucking gun down.”

“Get out of my way. “McGuinness moved sideways to clear his line of fire.

The wee girl screamed, “Pleeeease.” Just like the one in a burning car in 1974.

Davy snatched the .25 from his pocket and shot McGuinness. Once. Through his forehead.

Davy heard the ArmaLite clatter to the gravel, ignored McGuinness where he lay, and pulled the little girl to her feet. “It's all right,” he said, knowing it wasn't. “It's all right.” He hugged her, then held her at arm's length. He looked into her tear-stained face, saw her grazed knees, then put a hand under her chin and said, “Now run you away on to the nice Garda man at the bridge. He'll get you back to your mammy.”

“Yes, Mister,” she sobbed, and started to run.

Davy bent over McGuinness, fished a Canadian passport out of the man's inside pocket, flipped it open, confirmed that it was his own photo inside, and stuffed it in his jacket pocket.

He grabbed a handful of mud from the lot's verge and smeared it over the van's rear number plate, climbed in, and drove to the corner of the lot. A quick glance reassured him that the Gardai had obeyed McGuinness's instructions and were still standing on the bridge.

Moving deliberately, he eased the van onto the street and drove slowly to the corner, glancing twice in the rearview mirror to make sure he wasn't being followed. Once out of sight of the bridge, he accelerated along the road to Castlefinn, hoping to God Sean's people would be there, that they'd get him to Dublin by tonight, and that Sean would help him telephone Vancouver.

He stopped the van as he crossed the bridge over the stream at the outskirts of Lifford. Davy hefted the .25, the one Erin had smuggled into the Kesh, the one Davy had refused to use on Mr. Smiley in the corridor of H-7 or on the guards in the car park on the day of the jailbreak, the one that had snuffed McGuinness out like a guttering candle. It was McGuinness or the wee girl, Davy tried to reassure himself.

He stepped out, stood on the parapet, and hurled the revolver as far downstream as he could manage.

Davy didn't hear the splash. The morning was riven by the roar of five hundred pounds of exploding ammonal. He turned and saw a smoke cloud rising above Strabane, staining the sky and uniting in its stinking, all-embracing pall the steeples of the Catholic chapel and the Presbyterian church.

Davy climbed into the driver's seat, released the brake, and started on his solitary journey to Castlefinn, to Dublin, to Vancouver, and to Fiona.

 

EPILOGUE

IRELAND

In the twenty-five years of internecine strife (1969–94) in Northern Ireland, 3,268 people were killed and more than thirty thousand wounded. In late August of '94, Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, announced a ceasefire and called for talks with the British government. At the time of writing for initial publication in 2005, those talks still struggled on but were derailed by a December 2004, $43 million robbery of the Northern Bank in Belfast, which was blamed on a still-active Provisional IRA, and by the Republicans' refusal to decommission their secret arsenals.

Some weapons will never be found. A .25 revolver lies rusting on the gravel bed of a stream on the outskirts of Lifford, County Donegal. Six ArmaLites and two Lee-Enfield .303s are gradually corroding in County Tyrone in a neolithic passage grave, where spiders spin their webs over four camp beds and a chemical toilet.

Sammy McCandless managed to contact Inspector Alfie Ingram, who sent constables to sit by Sammy's bedside until he was discharged. The Provos were known to have walked into the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast and assassinate informers who were patients. Sammy read in
The Belfast Telegraph
about the outcome of the Strabane attack and the deaths of Eamon, Cal, and Erin. The story was accompanied by graphic photographs. When he threw up, the pain in his broken ribs was intense.

He was taken to England and housed alone in disused army married quarters at Catterick Camp on the dismal Yorkshire moors. Six days after he arrived, Sammy whispered “Erin” once, before he hanged himself with the belt of his nice, new, provided-by-the-British-taxpayer trousers. His discarded old clothes were found strewn over the army-issue furniture. Three days' worth of unwashed plates cluttered the sink. His name is reviled in County Tyrone, and along with Mollie MacDacker and Art O'Hanlon, he will never be forgotten.

Erin and Cal O'Byrne and Eamon Maguire, more “martyrs for old Ireland,” have been mostly forgotten by the people of Tyrone. Erin got her wish, and her remains were buried under an Irish sky beside Fiach, Cal, and Da in Ballydornan churchyard, close to the old Celtic cross. Eamon Maguire lies in the Maguire family plot. A black-framed photograph of each adorns their gravestones with the lines, only changing where the name of the victim is inserted:

I Gcuimne, Óglach

Erin Ó'Broin, Óglaight na hÉireann

A fuair bás ar saoirse na hÉireann.

Here lies Erin O'Byrne, volunteer of the Irish Army. She died in the cause of Irish freedom.

Turloch O'Byrne, Erin's brother, came back from Australia and still farms the family place. Tessie and Margaret are long dead.

The Gardai, as required by law, turned Brendan McGuinness's body over to the Lifford coroner. The cause of death was obvious, and it was a weekend after all, so the coroner decided to forgo the formality of a postmortem and signed the death certificate. As no one claimed the remains, they were sent to the medical school at University College, Galway. A student in the dissecting room remarked on McGuinness's glass eye and also asked the anatomy teacher if the heart of this particular cadaver wasn't abnormally shrunken.

Inspector Alfie Ingram's contribution to the success of the ambush at Strabane was recognized. He was promoted to chief inspector and continued his undercover work. On June 2, 1994, he was one of twenty-eight people accompanying RUC Detective Inspector Ian Phoenix on RAF Chinook helicopter HC2 ZD576. It flew into the Hill of Stone in the Mull of Kintyre, Scotland, at approximately 6:00
P.M
. All twenty-nine people on board died.

CANADA

Fiona Kavanagh and Davy McCutcheon live on Whyte Avenue. McCusker is long gone, as is his successor, a ginger tabby also named McCusker. Davy answers to the name Davy McConnan and, when he remembers, wears a pair of plain-glass granny glasses. Davy and Fiona are old now, and their lovemaking, though tender, is infrequent. Davy is less prone to flatulence but still insists on making tea, even though he grumbles about the water and says Canadian tea is not a patch on the Northern Irish brands.

Fiona's nightmare has never returned, but Davy sometimes wakes up trembling and sweating. Like most veterans of a war, he never speaks of his memories, but Fiona understands and comforts him.

Fiona retired in 1999 as principal of Charles Dickens Elementary School. Davy, after a rapid start in Expo '86 construction, managed to secure a loan from the Royal Bank of Canada and branched out in partnership with Jimmy Ferguson. They sold their construction company in 1997.

Davy and Fiona had an anxious few weeks in 1987, when Davy applied to renew his Canadian passport, but the new one arrived without any questions having been asked. The document withstood the scrutiny of the social worker when they adopted two Vietnamese girls in 1988.

Erin and Siobhan McConnan attend Simon Fraser University. Their da, usually accompanied by his friend Jimmy Ferguson, comes every Saturday in the season to watch them play varsity soccer. The two men can often be heard arguing about the relative merits of women's soccer and the Celtic matches they remember watching back in Belfast. After the games, they take their pints in Sean and Erin Heather's pub, the Irish Heather, in Gastown.

After the death of her father, Becky Johnston left teaching to move to Abbotsford and care for her mother. When her mother died in 1989, Becky surprised her friends in Vancouver by selling up and moving back to Henley-on-Thames. Every year, she and Fiona exchange Christmas cards. Fiona has noticed how spidery Becky's handwriting has become in the last few years.

Doctor Tim Andersen devoted himself to his patients and his research for two years. In June 1985, he entered
Windshadow
in the annual Round Bowen yacht race. His crew for the day failed to show up at Burrard Civic Marina. He sailed single-handedly to Bowen Island's Union Steamship Company Marina. At the prerace skippers' meeting, he was approached by a stranger of Danish extraction, Pernille Olafsen, who was willing to crew. He grudgingly agreed to take her aboard. During the race, when Squamish winds blew up to forty knots, it became apparent that she was a first-class foredeck hand, a fine helmsman, and fearless in a stiff blow.

Three years ago, Tim and Pernille, in their fifty-foot Swan-Cooper,
Windshadow II,
left Burrard Inlet on the first leg of their round-the-world cruise. Tim, then seventy-two, brushed aside any suggestion that he was too old and reminded people that Sir Francis Chichester had been in his seventies when he'd circumnavigated the globe single-handedly in
Gipsy Moth IV
. They were last heard of six months ago in Portsmouth, when Tim phoned Becky in Henley and arranged to meet her for dinner.

Dimitris Papodopolous graduated in 2001 from the Faculty of Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He lives with the Turkish daughter of his Greek father's business partner. Dimitris cannot tolerate Greek cooking, but both have appetites for sushi. They have two young children.

Jean-Claude Duplessis and Siobhan Duplessis (née Ferguson) live in Montreal. He is a senior producer at Radio Canada. Their children are grown, and Siobhan takes great pleasure from her grandchildren. She works as a volunteer for the Society for the Preservation of Grosse Isle, where, after the famine of 1845, Irish immigrants were quarantined and where thousands died of cholera and typhus fever. Every year on April 22, the date of Mike's funeral in 1974, she goes alone to the Saint Lawrence and drops in a single red rose, just as she had dropped a bouquet of red roses on his coffin.

She kneels and, as she did back then, crosses herself and says a quiet Ave.

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.

Blessèd art thou among women and blessèd is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.

P
ATRICK
T
AYLOR

Bowen Island, British Columbia, 2005

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE

Now and in the Hour of Our Death
is the sequel to
Pray for Us Sinners.
The titles are taken from the Roman Catholic prayer Ave Maria, or Hail Mary.

The reader will be reacquainted with Davy McCutcheon, ex–Provisional IRA bomb maker, now British prisoner, and Fiona Kavanagh, who has left Davy and lives and works as a school vice principal in Vancouver, British Columbia. How their estranged love for each other is resolved and how this resolution affects the lives of people around them are the forces that drive the story.

The scenes are set against two backdrops: the sectarian carnage that was Northern Ireland in the mid '80s, and the multicultural tranquility that was, and still is, the peace of Vancouver.

The events that occurred before and during the breakout by a number of Provisional IRA inmates from the Maze Prison in Ulster on September 25, 1983, are described as accurately as research allows. Names of historical figures are used fictitiously, and I have imagined their dialogue. Margaret Thatcher was the British prime minister at the time. Bobby Storey was the prisoner in charge of the escape, and Bic McFarlane the Officer Commanding the Provisional IRA inmates of the Maze Prison, always referred to by the Provisionals as the Kesh.