LITMIR.BIZ

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same thing. They’ll take you away for a couple of days and help you talk through it all. It will help no end with our training. You’ll be obliging as you can, won’t you, a chara? You will surely.’

      Ig and Dan were on the internal security team. These were the men who killed informers.

      ‘I am not an informer, Dominic.’

      ‘Turlough, I know you’re sound. This is just to help the lads understand the newest methods the Brits are using to break them. You just be as open and honest as you can be and you’ll come to no harm at all. OK?’

      ‘OK.’

      ‘They are in a small white van at the corner of the street. Oweny will walk you down. Sin é,’ he said and got up and walked out of the kitchen.

      ***

      It was amazing for Terry to think now that that was nearly thirty years ago, for the taste of his fear returned when he recalled the moment that Dom McGrath handed him over to the nutting squad.

      Oweny had led him out through the airlock and into the street. It was a beautiful bright early spring day and Terry feared he might never see another like it. He followed Oweny down the hill to the corner. He almost needed to tell his legs what to do. They were within sight of the cemetery, and about as far in another direction from the dark, shielded police station. Oweny appeared to have no fear of being seen. The white van was parked outside a doctor’s surgery. Oweny opened the rear door and waited for him. Terry could have made a run for the police station. If he was sure he was going to his death that would have been the sensible thing to do. But he gambled on the margin of possibility that he would survive this, so he did as he was told. He stepped up and wobbled a bit with his head down. Then the door closed behind him. He would not escape now. Dan, the driver, started the engine and drove off.

      Ig was in the front passenger seat. Terry had seen Ig at meetings in the early days, at teen dances earlier still. He’d had that nickname at school. It was short for Ignatius, from St Ignatius Loyola. And Dan had been one mean hurler for the parish team – short and fast. The big lumps of fellas that got picked for backs fell over each other when he wove through them.

      ‘Put this over your head,’ said Ig.

      He threw a black cotton bag over his shoulder without turning round. Terry picked it up. So they didn’t even trust him to see where they were going. He drew the bag over his head. It smelled of other people’s sweat and sick. You’d think they’d clean these things, if only to get rid of forensics on them. He settled himself as comfortably as a man can in the back of a moving vehicle with a low ceiling and a ribbed floor.

      Ig spoke again. ‘Here’s the deal, Terry. You are ours now, to do with as we wish, and you are safe if you give us nothing to worry about. The next few days are going to be the worst of your life. That’s the way it is. Nothing we can do about that and nothing personal. So just sit there and be quiet, and if you pray, pray into yourself.’

      They would be the worst days of his life. However much he had feared the police or his own conscience, before he let him go, Ig would make sure Terry feared the IRA more.

      They drove for an hour, much of it at speed on a long open road, probably the motorway, with the radio on. The chirpy music now sounded sarcastic. Ig and Dan talked about football, occasionally lapsing into a thoughtful silence as if remembering their mission. Terry tried to think through what he would say to them later, when they had him tied to a chair. He’d already told Dom he had weakened; he could hardly brag now that he had stood up to the Special Branch and braved their interrogation without flinching. Was there any small detail they would be able to work up into a real suspicion of him? He couldn’t think of one, but he knew that if there was one they would find it.

      The last part of the journey was up a stony country lane and Terry heard distant cattle, sheep and a dog running breathlessly alongside the van, then the darkness deepened, the acoustics softened. They were inside. Dan opened the rear door and he stumbled out onto rough ground and into the smell of stale peat, straw and damp wood. Hands gripped his arms.

      ‘Have you shit yourself yet?’ said Ig. ‘They all do.’

      They took him to a corner room and made him sit on a chair.

      ‘Don’t look round. Take the bag off.’

      For a moment, he breathed the smells of the countryside and heard sounds that might otherwise have cheered him: birdsong and a breeze. He felt a rush of ease and relief from the stifling filth of the bag. There was a table beside him with a cassette tape recorder on it, one of the single-speaker models with a built-in microphone. Ig and Dan sat on chairs behind him. It was a dirty room with bits of straw and filth on the floor and unpainted plastered walls that exuded decrepitude, lack of care. This was a place put together by someone without any feeling at all.

      Ig had a small cooking pot with a wooden spoon in it on the floor beside him. Dan had a pistol in his hand, an old Webley. The slicker guns were kept for more urgent work. It hardly mattered if this one jammed occasionally; there would always be time enough to take another shot.

      ‘Right,’ said Ig. He stood and switched on the cassette recorder and went back to his chair. ‘Just tell us what the cops did that was so clever that you nearly broke. And don’t be giving us the silent treatment; it won’t work here.’

      ‘They just went on and on about the wee girl.’

      ‘Not like that. Tell it as a story. Start from the beginning. No details of the operation.’

      ‘How can I talk about it if I don’t talk about the operation?’

      ‘No details about the operation.’

      Then Terry realised that this could be for the ears of people who weren’t in the movement. It was to be the confession that justified them shooting him. He soon discovered what the pot and wooden spoon were for. Ig used them to signal when he was to start speaking, so that his own voice never appeared on the tape. Then if he didn’t like what Terry said, he would rewind, find the last recorded bong on the pot and start again from there.

      Terry hadn’t broken for his Special Branch interrogators, but he told Ig and Dan stuff that endangered him. All IRA members had been ordered simply to sit still and say nothing, not even to ask for the toilet or a cigarette, just to brave out the haranguing and the abuse in the certainty that they would walk free if they provided no evidence against themselves.

      ‘I told them I was nowhere near Magheraloy. I told them I was drinking all day in Cullyhanna, that I was nowhere near the bomb. Once I asked them for water, just once. Once or twice I asked to go to the toilet. I told them nothing.’

      Ig stopped the tape and said, ‘So you broke the rule. Say you broke the rule and you are sorry. Wait.’ He pressed the record and play buttons again then tapped the pot with the spoon.

      ‘I had been properly trained in how to resist torture and interrogation by state forces. I regret that I did not put my faith in that training. I have let myself down and let my comrades down.’

      Ig stopped the tape. ‘That’ll do.’

      He was left to sleep on the floor and they went through the whole thing again the next day.

      Even years later, no matter how often he replayed the horror in his head, he still didn’t know at what moment they decided not to shoot him. One thing was for sure – his pleading had had nothing to do with it. When, finally exhausted and broken, he had gone down on his knees, weeping and cringing, begging them not to kill him, humiliated like a baby, his trousers soaking and cold against his skin, his pants full of cold shit, he knew even as he crumpled and moaned that they had seen many other men and women in the same state, and had spared some and killed some. And that each decision had been cold and logical. It had not really been in Terry’s power to save himself at all.

Three

      It was a frustrating drive home. The traffic on the Lisburn Road moved slower than walking pace at six every evening. The radio news said that the Republican Party president, Dominic McGrath, had

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