Terry Brankin Has a Gun - Malachi O'Doherty

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the feeling to match the thought. She’d be dreading the clarity that would overwhelm her. In the IRA he had mixed with people who could absorb shocks like this, who could manage with black humour. He had known men who had done dreadful things and he had stood at bars and drunk with them, never questioning them, always trusting that it wasn’t easy for them. But Kathleen was not out of the hard culture. She had cried for the whale stranded in the Thames when it was on television. Ig would have said, all that for a fucking fish!

      Kathleen came back into the room and her face was streaked with tears and her hair dishevelled. She practically spat at him. This was worse than he had feared. There was a logic in it he had not foreseen.

      ‘For years we tried to have a baby and we couldn’t. Well that was justice. That’s what that was. And I never knew.’

      He said, ‘You’ll have to compose yourself before the police come. Don’t give them the satisfaction, please.’

      ‘I don’t care what they think. I don’t care what they do.’

      ***

      Inspector Basil McKeague believed in God and he believed in Hell, and that made his job easier. He didn’t depend on the corporeal and temporal world for justice. He visited Terry Brankin’s home that night with the fullest information to be had on the Magheraloy bomb that had killed Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery and their daughter, Isobel. He knew who had provided the intelligence that the Chief Constable and his wife and child would be driving up from Rosslare, crossing the border at Magheraloy after returning from a holiday in France. He knew who had mistaken the Lavery car for the Chief Constable’s. He knew who had made the bomb and set it by the roadside. He knew everything. He knew that Dan Leeson, who had debriefed Terry Brankin for the IRA, had been a Special Branch agent. He had the transcripts and the tapes of that debriefing. He had everything but admissible evidence, and he could manage without that because he had faith in God. So he rang the Brankin doorbell that night assured that he was about to meet a man who would burn in Hell.

      ‘Mrs Brankin?’ The woman who answered was in her fifties, trim and healthy with it. She had been crying. That didn’t surprise him.

      She led him into the living room, where Terry Brankin was sitting on the sofa. He had turned on the television while Kathleen answered the door. Terry did not rise to shake hands with this man who had come to ruin their lives.

      He looked the cop over. He was tall and fat in a jacket that was too tight for him and a trouser belt that supported his paunch. Good skin, though; didn’t smoke or drink. Red cheeks, so he was either nervous or angry or had bad circulation. Terry would outlive him. This was a burnt-out ould peeler, not someone they’d have sent on a serious job, either to face danger or even make an arrest. There was nothing to worry about.

      Inspector McKeague said, ‘Would you mind turning the television off? I am going to need your full attention.’

      Terry was surly in the face of authority and did nothing, so Kathleen picked up the remote and stabbed the air with it three times until she had pressed the right button.

      ‘Thank you,’ said Inspector McKeague. ‘You both know why I am here?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Then you’ll excuse me if I sit.’ The inspector sat on the armchair by the fireplace and set his thick brown briefcase on his knee.

      ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ said Kathleen, not knowing what else to say.

      ‘He won’t trust us not to poison him,’ said Terry, so Kathleen sat down.

      ‘Well?’ said Terry. ‘You may begin.’

      The inspector took his business card from his top pocket and set it on the table, and then he spoke in the soft measured tones of someone who might have been selling insurance. ‘Mr Brankin, you were a suspect in a bombing incident in Magheraloy in March 1985 in which three members of the Lavery family were killed. Isn’t that right?’

      ‘I was questioned about it in Castlereagh.’

      Kathleen sat back with a stunned look on her face, amazed that conversations about murder and guilt were routine for both men.

      ‘Well, let’s be plain about our understanding of that incident. You were part of the bomb team. You were the lookout rather than the trigger man. That was Michael Harken, who met his just deserts later. Are you content to proceed with this conversation on that understanding?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘For God’s sake’, blurted Kathleen, ‘what’s the point in playing games now?’

      ‘I have not cautioned you, and none of what we say has any value for evidential purposes.’

      ‘So,’ said Terry, ‘you have no expectation that you will get to that point.’

      ‘Not really. But I have procedures to follow, largely for the sake of Seamus Lavery, the son of Patrick and Elizabeth Lavery, the twin brother of Isobel. I am instructed to review files of old killings and to offer the families of victims the best possible prospects of prosecution of the guilty. You are guilty. That is why I am here. Unless you actually choose to confess I can, of course, do nothing.’

      ‘Well, I am not going to confess.’

      Inspector McKeague opened his briefcase and, before the Brankins could move, he dropped a large colour photograph onto the floor where both could see it plainly. Kathleen wondered what the point of this was. It looked like an ad for some kind of ice cream, with streaks of raspberry running lavishly over the main confection. Then she gasped, clenched her mouth and tried not to be sick.

      ‘That’s little Isobel. She was sitting alone in the back of the car and took the force of the blast underneath her. That’s why the legs are splayed and the clothing is torn. I’m afraid you can’t quite make out her facial features.’

      ‘Huh, huh, huh …’ Kathleen’s convulsive gasping was out of her control.

      Terry leapt to try to console her but she pushed him away. ‘Get off me!’ He turned to McKeague, who was sitting calmly with another photograph in his hand.

      McKeague said, ‘Of course, if you don’t wish the interview to continue here, we can go to the station.’

      Terry had to contain the impulse to reach for him and fling him from the house. McKeague dropped the next photograph onto the carpet.

      ‘We think that most of this is Mrs Elizabeth Lavery. She and her husband were both wearing seat belts and it is remarkable how effective these can be in preserving the integrity of a body that has been torn by an under-car bomb. Here …’ – he dropped another picture – ‘is Patrick Lavery’s right leg. A colleague of mine had to fetch it out of a ditch. He says he will never forget that. A leg on its own is always heavier than you’d expect it to be.’

      Kathleen was weeping and shrieking as if she was being jabbed at with a sharp knife. She had both hands in front of her face, trying to make it all go away, but it was futile, for what she was trying to banish was the past and the future, and none of it was under her control.

      Kathleen’s phone beeped on the seat beside her. She checked the text without slowing down, one hand on the wheel. ‘Are you OK?’ Terry never abbreviated.

      She was not OK but she felt calmer now that she had a project in hand.

      That morning she had told him that she would leave if he didn’t confess to the bombing. She had spent the night awake in their bed with her back to him, resenting his ability to sleep. She supposed he’d learned that too from the IRA, switching off the emotions. The only rest she got was after the whirling in her brain had settled into a resolve. She’d told him as soon as she was aware that he was awake beside her.

      ‘What you’re asking for is daft,’ he’d said. ‘I have done my time – in my head. Do you think I have not agonised over this for years? I suffered long and hard.’ She doubted that.

      He

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