Traditionally, the IRA killed as an example: murdering a traitor in a public fashion was a means of reinforcing social norms. But in the case of Joe Lynskey, the Provos would break that tradition. At a certain point, Lynskey simply disappeared. No announcement was made about the verdict of his court-martial. No body was dumped on the street. Nor, indeed, was any explanation ever offered to the Provo rank and file about the true attacker of Joe Russell, or the sordid backstory of the shooting at the Cracked Cup. Nobody said a word.
Because Lynskey’s work often took him away for long stretches, when he initially vanished, in August 1972, his family did not realise that anything was amiss. A rumour took hold that he was in America – that he had gone to start a new life, as many people during those days did. This was a deliberate campaign of misinformation. At one point, a nephew of Lynskey’s was in New York and met a local Irish republican who told him, ‘You just missed Joe. He was here the other week.’ When Lynskey’s mother died, three years later, she believed that her son must be alive and well and living in the United States.
By that time, he was already long dead. In a twist that represented either a small kindness or a terrible cruelty, when death came for Joe Lynskey, it was in the person of a friend. Dolours Price arrived at Lynskey’s sister’s house to take him across the border. She did not tell Lynskey that he was being summoned to his execution. She said there was a meeting in the Republic that he needed to attend.
Lynskey descended the stairs, freshly bathed and shaven and clutching an overnight bag, as if he were leaving for a weekend in the country. They got into the car and drove south towards the Republic. Lynskey did not say anything much, but Price realised that he knew exactly where they were going. It was just the two of them in the car. He was stronger than she was; he could have overpowered her. But instead he sat there meekly, holding his little bag in his lap. At one point, he tried to explain to her what had happened, and she said, ‘I don’t want to know, Joe. I don’t want to know. I just have this very difficult thing to do.’
He was sitting in the back seat, and she looked at him in the rearview mirror. I’ll take him to the ferry, she thought. I’ll take him to the ferry and say he ran off. He could escape to England and never come back. But instead she kept driving. Why doesn’t he jump out of the car? she wondered. Why doesn’t he smack me on the head and run away? Why doesn’t he do something to save himself? But as she drove on, she realised that he could not act to save himself for the same reason that she could not act to save him. Their dedication to the movement would not allow it. She had vowed to obey all orders, and Lynskey, it seemed, had chosen to accept his fate.
When they arrived in County Monaghan, just across the border, a group of men were waiting for them under a lamp post. Lynskey thanked her for driving him and told her not to worry. He reached out and shook her hand.
‘I’ll be seeing you Joe,’ Price said. But she knew that she wouldn’t be, and she cried the whole way home.
9
Orphans
One day in January 1973, a television crew from the BBC arrived at St Jude’s Walk. They were looking for the McConville children. Jean had been gone for more than a month. The local press had become aware of the story after an initial article was published in the newsletter of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Under the headline WHERE IS JEAN MCCONVILLE, the article described how the widowed mother of ten had been missing since 7 December, ‘when she was unceremoniously removed from her home’. Picking up on that original item, the Belfast Telegraph ran a short article on 16 January, ‘SNATCHED MOTHER MISSING A MONTH’, which noted that none of the children had reported the abduction of their mother to the police. The next day, the paper appealed for help in solving the ‘mystery disappearance’.
The BBC crew discovered Helen and the younger children living alone in the flat. After the cameras had been set up, the children sat huddled on the sofa, framed by a backdrop of striped yellow wallpaper, and described their ordeal. ‘Four young girls come into the kitchen. They ordered all the kids up the stairs and they just walked in and took my mummy,’ Agnes said quietly. ‘Mummy walked out in the hall, she put on her coat and left.’
‘What did your mummy say when she left?’ the interviewer asked.
‘She had a big squeal,’ Agnes said.
‘Do you know why your mummy was taken away?’
They didn’t. Helen was a lovely-looking teenager, with the same pale and narrow face as her mother, her dark hair swept to either side. She sat with Billy on her lap and nervously averted her eyes from the camera. The boys were fair and ginger. Tucker was sitting on Agnes’s lap, wearing a blue turtleneck and shorts, though it was the dead of winter, revealing his knobbly knees. The kids were twitchy, their eyes roving all over the place. Michael sat to Helen’s side, nearly cut out of the shot. He stared at the camera, blinking.
Michael, Helen, Billy, Jim, Agnes and Tucker McConville (Still from BBC Northern Ireland news footage, January 1973)
‘Helen, I believe you’re looking after the family,’ the reporter said. ‘How are you managing to cope?’
‘Okay.’
‘When do you think you’ll see your mummy again?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘Nobody’s been in touch with you at all?’
Agnes mentioned that they had seen Granny McConville.
‘She must be a fairly old lady by now,’ the reporter said.
‘She’s blind,’ Agnes said. Agnes was thirteen. She noted, hopefully, that her mother had been wearing red slippers when she was taken away. It was like an image from a fairy tale. A clue. Agnes said that the siblings would ‘keep our fingers crossed and pray hard for her to come back’.
Granny McConville may have been part of the reason that the children had not reported Jean’s disappearance to the police. She told people that she was afraid to, though she did not spell out precisely why. The children believed, fervently, that their mother would soon come home. But things began to look bleak. They were able to draw on Jean’s pension. But where one might expect the close-knit community in Belfast to rally around and care for such a family, dropping by with a hot meal or assisting Helen with the children, nobody did. Instead, it was as if the whole community in Divis simply chose to ignore the flatful of abandoned children on St Jude’s Walk. It might simply have been that this was a time of crisis in Belfast and people had worries of their own, or there could have been some darker reason. But in any case, nearly everyone in the community simply looked the other way.
A social worker did visit the children not long after Jean was taken. The authorities had received a call about a pack of siblings who had been looking after themselves. A bureaucrat created a new file and indicated that the children’s mother appeared to have been abducted by ‘an organisation’ – shorthand for a paramilitary group. The social worker spoke with Granny McConville, who did not seem overly perturbed. According to notes from the meeting, Jean’s mother-in-law asserted, primly, that Helen was ‘a very capable girl’ and seemed to be managing with the children. Helen did not get along with Granny McConville any more than Jean had. ‘No fondness there,’ the social worker wrote.
This was not exactly a healthy environment for young children, and the social worker recommended putting them into care – turning them over to the state, to be brought up at a group home. But the McConville children flatly refused. Their mother would be returning any day now, they explained. They needed to be at home when she got back.
They held on to one another, marooned inside the flat. Bedtime was suspended and dishes piled up in the sink. The neighbours, rather than help, started to complain to the authorities that they couldn’t sleep at night because the children were making so much noise, with nobody to supervise them, and you could hear the racket through the walls. Even the Catholic Church declined to intervene. One report from the social worker, just a week before Christmas, noted that a local parish priest was aware of the children’s predicament but was �
�unsympathetic’. As other local children were composing Christmas lists, the McConvilles were running out of food. They didn’t have much money coming in. Only Archie, who worked as an apprentice roof tiler, had a job. The children started getting into trouble. Michael would stay out late and shoplift food. Eventually he was caught, along with one of his brothers, stealing chocolate biscuits from a shop in town. Asked by the police why he had done it, he said that he and his siblings had not eaten in several days. They were starving. Michael was eleven years old. When the authorities questioned the McConville kids about their parents, Jim told them, ‘My daddy is dead and the IRA took my mummy away.’
There is no record in the files of the Royal Ulster Constabulary of any investigation into the disappearance of Jean McConville. She was abducted at the end of the most violent year of the conflict, and this sort of incident, horrible though it was, may not have risen to such a level that the police felt the need to concern themselves. A detective from Springfield Road police station did stop by the flat on 17 January, but the police were not able to offer any substantive clues and do not appear to have pursued the matter. Two local Members of Parliament, when they discovered what had happened, decried the kidnapping as ‘a callous act’ and appealed for help in finding Jean. But nobody came forward with information.
Belfast could sometimes feel more like a small town than a city. Even before the Troubles, the civic culture of the place was clotted with unsubstantiated gossip. Almost as soon as Jean McConville had disappeared, rumours began to circulate that she had not been kidnapped at all – that, on the contrary, she had absconded of her own free will, abandoning her children to shack up with a British soldier. The children, who were already seized with worry, became aware of these stories. They would hear people whispering, feel the hot glare of judgement when they saw their neighbours in the shop or on the street. Back at the flat, some of them would wonder aloud if it could be true. Could she really have left them? It didn’t seem possible. But how else to explain the fact that she had not returned? Archie McConville would later conclude that all that pernicious whispering amounted to more than just salt in the wound. It was a kind of poison, he decided, ‘an attempt to wreck our minds’.
One by-product of the Troubles was a culture of silence. With armed factions at war in the streets, an act as innocent as making enquiries about a vanished loved one could be dangerous. One day that February, a posse of boys from the youth wing of the IRA seized Michael McConville. They took him to a room where they tied him up and stabbed him in the leg with a penknife. They let him go with a warning: Don’t talk to anyone about what happened to your mother.
The interlude of freedom did not last. By February, social services had initiated the process of relocating the children to orphanages. One day, three women turned up at the flat and declared that they had been granted tenancy and were ready to move in. This was happening all the time in Belfast, a cruel expediency of wartime. It was like an awful game of musical chairs: no sooner was one family uprooted than another uprooted family would take their home. The children refused to leave. But the state had decided, and ultimately the kids were made wards of court.
The act of disappearing someone, which the International Criminal Court would eventually classify as a crime against humanity, is so pernicious, in part, because it can leave the loved ones of the victim in a purgatory of uncertainty. The children held out hope that they had not been orphaned, and that their mother might suddenly reappear. Perhaps she had developed amnesia and was living in another country, unaware that she had left a whole life behind in Belfast.
But, even then, there was reason to believe that something terrible had happened to Jean McConville. About a week after she was kidnapped, a young man whom the children did not know had come to the door of the flat and handed them their mother’s purse and three rings she had been wearing when she left: her engagement ring, her wedding ring, and an eternity ring that Arthur had given her. Desperate for information, the children asked where Jean was. ‘I don’t know anything about your mother,’ the man said. ‘I was just told to give you these.’
Years later, Michael McConville would look back and isolate that encounter as the moment he realised that his mother must be dead.
10
The Freds
One autumn day in 1972, a laundry van pulled into the Twinbrook estate, on the outskirts of Belfast, and Sarah Jane Warke got out and walked up to one of the houses. The van was a regular presence in the neighbourhood. There were not a lot of shops in the area, so it was common to see traders going door-to-door, offering their wares. The company was called Four Square Laundry, and once a week Sarah would come to the door, pick up a pile of dirty laundry, and then return it, clean and neatly folded, several days later. People liked the service; the prices were cut-rate. And people liked Sarah, a pretty, ingratiating young woman. The driver, Ted Stuart, was a young man from County Tyrone, who mainly stayed behind the wheel. But he was an easy-going fellow, and the local customers liked him, too. The kids on the estate called him Teddy. Twinbrook was home to both Catholics and Protestants, but it was relatively calm by the standards of Belfast at the time.
Sarah walked up to one of the residences. A housewife came to the door, and she and Sarah were exchanging a few words when suddenly they were interrupted by a loud cracking noise. Sarah spun round to see that two men had appeared. One of them held a machine gun; the other had a rifle. They were standing in a nimbus of smoke, crouched, with their backs to Sarah, spraying bullets from close range into the driver’s side of the laundry van, where Ted was sitting. Sarah stood frozen in the doorway, watching helplessly as Ted was killed. Then one of the gunmen turned in her direction.
After the debacle of the internment raids, the British Army and the Special Branch of the Royal Ulster Constabulary had continued to focus, with ever greater intensity, on cultivating sources within both loyalist and republican paramilitary groups. Brendan Hughes started to develop a suspicion, in 1972, that he might have an informant in D Company. His intelligence officer told him that a young volunteer, a former asphalt layer named Seamus Wright, had been arrested earlier in the year – and that ever since his arrest, he would go missing from time to time.
Wright, who was twenty-five, had recently married, and Hughes paid a visit to his wife, Kathleen. She said that Seamus had been arrested in February and held by the British, but then he had telephoned a shop near her home and left a message for her, saying that he had ‘scarpered’ – run away. Seamus was in England now, Kathleen continued. He was in Birmingham; she had an address. Hughes suggested that perhaps Kathleen should go there and see Seamus. He was enlisting the young bride of a suspected spy to serve as a spy herself: she would pay Seamus a visit and try to get him to return with her. Then she would report back to Brendan Hughes.
Kathleen flew to England. But when she got there, Seamus refused to come home. So she returned alone and met Hughes at a house on Leeson Street. During this debriefing, Kathleen confirmed his worst fears. Seamus had been turned by the British, she said. When she saw her husband, he had been accompanied by an Englishman – some sort of handler. But there was a catch, she continued: Seamus wanted out. He planned to flee, to escape his handlers. But he wanted a guarantee that if he came back to Belfast, he wouldn’t be shot by the IRA. This was a bold proposal from someone who had violated the trust of the Provos and gone into business with the enemy, a transgression that was generally punishable by death. But sensing an opportunity to learn how the British were going about their recruitment of double agents, Hughes consented, and gave the guarantee.
Not long afterwards, Seamus Wright returned to West Belfast, where he was interrogated in a house for two days. He explained that during his initial arrest by the British, they had told him that they could link him to an explosion that had killed a member of the security forces. They were so adamant that they had the goods on him that Seamus began to suspect he had been grassed – given up to the authorities by a ‘superg
rass’, a paid informer. Once his handlers had secured his cooperation, they asked him about guns and explosives. But what they really wanted to know about was the Dirty Dozen. They told Seamus that if he would just give them the names of everyone in D Company, he would not be charged with any crime.
Hughes was dismayed to discover that he had a traitor in his company – a traitor who had revealed the identities of the Dirty Dozen. One irony of the Provos’ pretence to being a legitimate army was that in those early days, they were structured much like the British Army, with battalions and companies and a clear, legible chain of command. What this meant, in practice, was that if the enemy succeeded in turning someone – even a relatively junior player like Seamus Wright – they could discern the org chart of a large swathe of the organisation.
After agreeing to be an informant, Wright said, he was flown to England, for training as a double agent. Then he was flown back to Northern Ireland, with the understanding that he would now begin to gather intelligence on the Provos. As Hughes listened intently, Wright described a secret compound at Palace Barracks, where the army housed its prized informants. There was a clandestine unit inside the army, Wright said – they called it the MRF, and it managed both republican and loyalist informants. Wright explained that the army controlled a stable of individuals who had been induced to switch sides and were now working undercover for the British. Members of the MRF would show them newsreel footage of funerals and surveillance pictures of suspects, then ask them to pick out the people they knew. Sometimes Wright’s handlers would load him into an armoured personnel carrier and drive into the Falls. As they prowled through the narrow streets, Wright would peek through the vehicle’s gun slits and identify the pedestrians they passed.
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