LITMIR.BIZ

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agents all around McGrath, bugging his office and his car and turning people who worked for him. It wasn’t Terry that Dominic should have been worrying about back then; it was Oweny the security man and Dan the driver of the white van – both informers. A year before, Oweny had been whisked out of his home by MI5 and taken on an RAF flight to somewhere in England for his own safety. Even his wife wouldn’t accept calls from him now. And Dan was dead. The poor man had foolishly thought that the peace process enabled him to go on living in Belfast after he had been outed. He couldn’t bear to live anywhere else. Then somebody – probably Ig – had rung his doorbell one night and shot him in the face with a double-barrelled shotgun: the most thorough and least traceable of weapons.

      Think how much worse things could have turned out, Terry said to himself. Had he stayed in the IRA and been loyal to McGrath, he would have been surrounded by the same spies. The Brits would have known his every move and they would have kept him in place for as long as they had judged him to be a useful fool. His least unpleasant fate would have been to spend most of the 1990s in jail making Celtic harps out of matchsticks for Irish Americans to raffle in bars – like Boomer, whoever the fuck Boomer was. And that would have been hell.

      ***

      Kathleen was in the shower when the thought came to her: how much do I know? How much do I want to know? She had lived in Belfast through the closing years of the Troubles, when the bombs were bigger than they had been before and the sectarian killings had multiplied and come close. She wasn’t naïve. She was sure she wasn’t naïve.

      She had lost a friend to loyalist killers. She had learnt that you keep your sanity if you stop asking questions, stop wondering what impact even your own words might ultimately have. Then she turned up the heat to try to make her skin hurt enough to clear her mind of bad memories and big fears.

      What would a bullet do to a skull? She had often thought about that, thought about how a person might feel in the last moments of mental and physical torment before being finished off, usually when fearing for Terry. She had only ever seen people shot dead in films, and she assumed that in the real world it was bloodier. If Terry had shot a soldier from a distance, without seeing his fear, or if he had shot someone in self-defence, she could forgive that more easily, but she knew that IRA men had shot people in the face, had emptied pistols into them as they lay on the ground, that they had shot women. Over the years she had seen the coverage of all their doings on the nightly news and had often blanked it out and turned to something else rather than ask herself: would Terry have done that if they had ordered him to?

      But she knew that Terry was a good man. She knew that, like hundreds of others, he had got swept into a war that was not of his making; that he had found his personal, even moral bearings in the depths of that war, and that he had saved himself from death and imprisonment though not from guilt.

      As she dressed in the bedroom, she heard him come through the front door. She brushed her hair and studied her face in the mirror, recognising the gravity in her own expression. She would have to ask him.

      He had dropped his briefcase on the floor and was planted on the sofa, bent over and rubbing the day’s stress out of his brow. The room was already untidy again.

      ‘Hi.’ She leaned over and kissed him on the head.

      ‘Sorry about all this.’

      ‘We’ll manage – but tell me everything before they get here. Don’t leave me exposed.’

      He swallowed hard. ‘OK. Sit down.’

      She sat opposite him so that she could see his face. ‘What are they going to ask you about?’

      ‘The Magheraloy bomb. It was one of the famous ones. Did you hear about it?’

      ‘Where the frig is Magheraloy? No, I never heard about it.’

      He sighed. ‘It was on telly the other night. Magheraloy is in County Louth, touching the border. We did a lot of ambushes down there. This one went wrong.’

      An accident. Good, she thought. An accident would be easier to live with. Anyone can have an accident.

      ‘The plan had been to blow up the Chief Constable. We were into big, high-profile targets then – spectaculars, the media called them. Remember the whack at Downing Street. So that was the thinking: do something big and stay in the news. We had set up an ambush. The Chief Constable of the RUC was coming back from holiday with his wife and kid in the car.’

      ‘Oh, no!’

      ‘We were happy to take the kid and all, so long as we got him. It wasn’t us that coined the phrase collateral damage. You’ve seen it on the news yourself, missiles hitting bridges in Iraq and some poor fucker driving a trailer of melons or something goes up in flames … but what the hell.’

      ‘It doesn’t make it right.’

      ‘It was worse, love. Much worse. We hit the wrong car.’

      ‘And?’

      ‘And three people died for nothing. Father, mother and daughter.’

      She hadn’t taken it all in yet. ‘Who were they?’

      ‘They were called Lavery. They were from somewhere in south County Derry. You don’t watch the funeral or read the stories when you do something like that. You don’t want to know.’

      ‘Oh God.’ She had to try and comprehend this. There had been a girl in her class at school called Lavery, and there was a lecturer at the university called Lavery.

      ‘Oh God, Terry. A whole family … just killed.’

      ‘You rationalise. You tell yourself they could have crashed into another car or a lamp post; they just happened to run into our bomb.’

      ‘Fuck.’ This was different from what she had expected, from what she could excuse, had excused. She was stunned. She had imagined Terry as an IRA man shooting at soldiers and policemen who were armed and alert to the threat, who were defending the political set-up that had produced the Troubles in the first place. She had imagined him attacking people who expected to be attacked, who were paid to take the risk. But, if she was honest, she had always known too that children had been killed. From the very start, children had died in ricochets and bombings. She suddenly felt stupid for never having asked Terry if he had been implicated in the least defensible things that the IRA had done.

      ‘What was your part in it?’ she asked.

      ‘I set the bomb at the side of the road and laid down the tripwire for another guy to trigger it. Mick Harken. He’s dead now. Then I did lookout for the car and for anyone that might come near us.’

      ‘Whose mistake was it?’

      ‘Mine. I signalled to him to hit the wrong car.’

      It seemed a small relief to her, that he had not actually pressed the button, or whatever it was they did. Shit! Fuck; she was screaming inside herself. Something like panic was building up in her. A child! Fine little limbs, soft smooth skin, hair in bows, eyes as bright as jewels.

      ‘You saw the car coming. Had you got the number wrong or something? The colour? What?’ She hadn’t worked out the worst of it yet.

      ‘It was the right colour and the right make.’

      ‘Did you not see the child?’ Then it dawned on her what a stupid question that was. Of course he had seen the child. The car was the right colour and the right make and there were three people in it and one of them was a child. That’s what made it the right car.

      ‘Ah!’ she gasped. The breath would not come to her. When she could speak she said, ‘How old? The child – how old?’

      ‘A wee girl. Ten.’

      At least Terry’s frankness helped. She’d be nearly forty now.

      ‘Oh, dear God. To take that much away from people.’

      Kathleen was perplexed by the enormity of her husband having killed a child. Every time her mind tried to

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