The Girl From the Killing Streets

by David Hough

  Martin toyed with the idea of saying nothing, but that might not endear him to the two detectives. He decided on an expurgated version of Murphy’s account. “He told me about the difficult life she had, growing up in Mafeking Street. I think I understand her better now that I know more about her background.”

  “You still count her as your girlfriend?”

  “More than that. I want to give her a better life.”

  “In Belfast?”

  “Good heavens, no. In England. I plan to join the British army and I want to take her to England with me.”

  “Join the army? Be very careful, Martin. Sorcha comes from a Nationalist background. She won’t take kindly to living amongst British army wives. You may be creating one whole heap of trouble for both of you.”

  “I’ll handle it.”

  Neither policeman responded immediately. Then McIlroy said, “Take a look behind, Will. We’re being followed.”

  DS Evans turned in his seat. “I see it. A blue Mini. Fifty yards behind. Two men in the front. They don’t look too friendly.”

  Martin shifted to look through the back window. Sure enough, there was the following car.

  DCI McIlroy spoke calmly. “Any sign of weapons?”

  “The passenger side,” Evans said. “The end of a rifle barrel is just visible above the dash.”

  “Right. Once we get out amongst the busy traffic on the main roads we’ll be caught up in the exodus and I’ll have problems losing him. Get your pistol out, Will.”

  “Not a shooting match boss?” But the younger man took his pistol from its holster and held it in his lap.

  “Wind down your window,” his boss said. “I’ll give you one chance to shoot out his tyres. Just one chance. Don’t miss it.”

  He swung the car into a screaming handbrake turn at the junction at the end of the road until he was facing back on the opposite side.

  “Get ready, Will.”

  The seconds ticked by slower now. The Cortina advanced down the road. As it came abeam the Mini, McIlroy shouted, “Now, Will! Take him!”

  The Welshman raised his pistol, aimed and fired. The single shot took out the Mini’s front offside tyre. The Cortina moved on and a second shot took out the rear tyre.

  Then McIlroy rammed his foot to the floor and the Cortina raced to the end of the road.

  “Well done, Will.”

  McIlroy took the corner fast, two wheels barely keeping contact with the ground. And then they were out of sight of the Mini with not a single shot being fired in retaliation.

  Martin heaved a sigh of relief. If this was police work, he was impressed, but he was also glad he was no part of it. He hoped the army would not expect him to get involved in a shooting match. All he wanted was a quiet office and one whole heap of routine paperwork.

  DS Evans seemed to be similarly relieved as he put away his pistol. “Well, boss… that was an abortive attempt to find the girl, so what now?”

  “There hasn’t been an explosion in a while. The campaign seems to be over for the moment. We’ll drop this young man somewhere safe and then we’ll check on what’s happening at some of the bomb locations. We may be able to help with the clear-up.”

  “The girl?”

  “Nothing more we can do about her right now. Remind me where you live, Martin.”

  Martin gave him the address in Harold Street.

  “We’ll drop you somewhere near there.” McIlroy glanced at his colleague. “Turn up the radio, Will. Let’s find out where the last bomb exploded and see if we can be of any help there.”

  As the DCI had expected, the main routes through Belfast were far busier than usual. He navigated through it until he was driving along the upper part of the Ballysillan Road. He pulled up at the kerbside by the Eglinton Presbyterian church.

  “Is this near enough to home for you, Martin?”

  “Near enough. I can walk from here.”

  “This is Protestant territory, so you should be safe here. Promise us you won’t stray back into Nationalist territory. Next time it could cost you your life.”

  “I’ll heed your warning, Chief Inspector.”

  “And if you find Sorcha Mulveny I want you to phone me at North Castle Street barracks. If I’m not there, leave a message. That girl needs help.”

  Something in DCI McIlroy’s voice told Martin it was more than help he had in mind. It was an arrest.

  “I’ll do that, I promise,” he said. He tried to sound sincere, but he had no intention of setting up Sorcha for police custody.

  “Be careful in the meantime.”

  “Sure.”

  Martin got out of the car and walked away without looking back. What now? The warnings he’d been given were sound, he knew that, but he still needed to find Sorcha.

  ***

  January 1981

  Later that morning, I studied Susan’s notes while she prepared lunch for us. She stood at the cooker wearing only one of my casual shirts. From the rear she was the image of Annie, just as I remembered her in those glorious days soon after we were married. Was that good or bad?

  “You did a sound job interviewing Martin,” I said. “If I’d been there at the time I would have been very concerned about him.”

  “Too naïve by far?” she said, taking two steaks from the frying pan and shovelling them onto plates.

  “He’s grown up since then. So has Sorcha, in a way. I’ll need to get back to her again and find out exactly where she was and what she was doing at that time.”

  “Back to Belfast?” Susan paused and there was a hitch in her voice. She turned to face me, a look of doubt spread across her face. “When?”

  “Not straight away. I need time to bring my manuscript up to date. Can you afford to stay a week or so?”

  Her look of doubt changed into a wide smile. “Try and stop me.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  February 1981

  It was a bitterly cold evening when we stepped off the aircraft at Belfast’s Aldergrove Airport. A chill wind blew dark rain clouds down from the north. We picked up a hire car at the airport and drove straight to Susan’s flat. Our plan was to see Sorcha the following morning and Martin in the afternoon. What we did after that would depend upon how much we learned on this visit.

  The rainfall increased as we drove down from the waterlogged hills into the two blighted half-cities. A sudden heavy deluge pounded on the car roof, but I had lived here long enough to know that this sort of weather had an important role to play. There would be few riots in rain like this. Belfast rioting was a fair-weather sport. The killing streets would be relatively quiet tonight. In the hospitals the surgeons would have a few moments to breathe easy. They would deserve it: they were amongst the most experienced in the world when it came to dealing with gun and bomb injuries.

  The flat felt cold when we arrived, and Susan was quick to turn up the heating. She switched on the television for the late evening news. The previous week Ian Paisley had held a rally at the City Hall where he signed a covenant and announced a series of protest rallies against Margaret Thatcher’s dialogue with the Irish Prime Minister, Charles Caughey. In England it was already old news, no longer worth mentioning, but here the fallout still captured the headlines. Nothing changed. We didn’t bother to see the end of the broadcast.

  The rain clouds had passed by the next morning, leaving a cold breeze to dry out the landscape. After breakfast we drove to the prison in Armagh where Sorcha was led into the interview room soon after we arrived.

  “I’ve been waitin’ to see youse again,” she announced. “We’re getting’ to an important part of the book now, ain’t we?”

  “We are,” I assured her. “And the whole thing is beginning to come together nicely. Susan has been helping me to edit the earlier parts of the manuscript.”

  Sorcha eyed Susan inquisitively. “Youse two seem to be spendin’ a lot of time together.”

  Were the signs that obvious? Susan glanced away and her cheeks reddened
.

  I looked down at my notebook as I replied. “I appreciate Susan’s analysis of the story you’ve been telling us, Sorcha. She seems to see deeper into people’s feelings and emotions than I do.”

  “Is that all there is to it?”

  “We’ve become good friends.” I hurried on, anxious not to get mired in the truth. “How about you tell us what happened to you after the bombings.”

  ***

  21st July 1972

  1610 BST

  She walked unsteadily. At first, thoughts that were not fully grasped floated into and out of focus. Only her hearing was fully alert, waiting for the muffled crump of yet more bombs. But for the moment, it seemed, the bombings had ceased. When her mind eventually became clearer it held no feelings of satisfaction. She had no sense of having done something positive for Belfast, or Ireland. Quite the opposite.

  She breathed in the stench of burning, watched the firemen and troops damping down the flames at the Cavehill shops, and she despaired. Two women and a boy were killed here. There was nothing more Sorcha could do now that so many bombs had either been detonated or defused. Nothing except feel misery for the innocents who had died or been injured. It should not have happened like this.

  She found a church hall that had been opened up as a place of refuge for people trying to escape the terrors on the streets. It was a Protestant church in a Protestant area, but Sorcha didn’t care. What the hell did any sort of religion matter now? Then again, the hall was supposed to be a place of Christian peace, so maybe she would find some small amount of comfort here. The people here were Prods, just like Martin, but the building was open to all, so she walked in.

  Most of the people who had gathered inside were women and children. Many of the women were white-faced and tired. The younger children were unusually quiet, clinging to their mothers. The older ones, the teenagers, sat talking to one another in hushed tones. No one shouted or railed against the atrocities that had been committed in their city. In those surreal surroundings, no one seemed to have the energy to cry out. A young, pale-faced minister sat beside an elderly woman with a blood-stained bandage about her head. He patted her hand and spoke softly to her while she sat open-mouthed but silent.

  It was the first time in years that Sorcha had been inside any church building, but it seemed to offer what she was looking for: some sort of comfort. She was in need of a lot of that. Not religious comfort; she had no time for that, so the minister had better steer clear of her. No, she needed the emotional relief that came from being out of sight of the carnage, out of sight of the dead bodies, out of sight of the crumbling buildings torn apart by the bombs. It was all still there, of course, beyond the walls of the church hall. But, for a while, she was anxious to shut her mind against the worst of it.

  Pretend it wasn’t happening.

  Fool herself.

  She accepted a cup of tea from an old lady who had been wobbling around the room on spindly legs, handing out hot drinks. Sorcha closed her eyes and sipped at the cup gingerly.

  “’Tis all wrong. Such wickedness,” the old lady said, but her voice was dull and not at all angry. It was the soft protest of a helpless kitten about to be drowned. How did she keep her temper when the IRA was blasting her home city to bits? Sorcha had no answer so she kept her eyes closed and simply nodded. She was past the point of conversation anyway. What could she possibly say to a Protestant lady on a day of Nationalist infamy such as this?

  I’m sorry? I knew where the bombs would go off and I did little enough to stop it? I should have done more, much more, and now I’m sorry?

  Is that what she should say?

  No, the whole thing was now beyond any apology. Beyond hope.

  When the teacup was empty, she sat for some minutes, slowly regaining a degree of resilience. She tried to drain her mind of all her recent memories, but it didn’t work. The horror returned and she remembered her part in the campaign. She had been given a list of targets and ordered to make hoax phone calls to the police. She knew what was planned and she should have… could have done more.

  Dear God, she should not have had that list. It was nothing to do with her… except that she was involved because she was too close to Fitzpain and his thugs, his Pain Men. And she was as bad as them.

  That was the worst part of it all. She was as bad as them.

  She looked around the church hall and saw only dull, empty faces filled with tears and sadness. Was this what the bombing campaign was all about? Turning women and children into broken wrecks? Was this how the terrorists hoped to unite Ireland?

  God forgive them.

  On a sudden impulse, she finally decided. She would go to England with Martin and never again think about this day. Never again think of Belfast and Mafeking Street. She stood up, more determined than ever to find Martin and tell him of her decision.

  If only she knew where he lived. It was somewhere around here. But where? She remained standing while tears began to trickle down her cheeks. Where are you, Martin? I need you, need someone to help me.

  Dear God, I ned someone to help me.

  ***

  February 1981

  It was all there: the truth of how the Bloody Friday bombings affected this young woman. Raw human emotion still sat heavy with her, even within those prison walls. Susan grabbed at my arm and pulled herself closer to me. She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped at her eyes.

  I put down my pen and sat back in my seat. “Why did you never talk about this before now? Why did you not explain the effect it had upon you?”

  “What was the point? I did wrong and I pleaded guilty. I have to pay the price for what I did… or didn’t do… and I’ll be paying for it fer the rest of me life.”

  “But you’re not a bad person, Sorcha. Had you grown up next door to me, with the sort of decent family I had to support me, you would have made a success of your life. I’m sure of it. You have it in you to be good.”

  She sniffed and turned her head away. “But I didn’t grow up next door to youse, did I? And how would youse have turned out if youse’d grown up next door to me in Mafeking street? Can youse answer me that?”

  “No. I have no answer to that.” I thought about it for a few moments and then the truth hit me suddenly. I would have grown up just like her. I shivered and picked up my pen. “Let’s carry on, Sorcha. Tell us the rest.”

  ***

  21st July 1972

  1640 BST

  Sorcha forced herself to walk on. She left the church hall and walked slowly along the lower end of the Ballysillan Road, close to the Crumlin Road. She still felt uncomfortable in the second-hand clothes, but at least she now looked semi-respectable.

  Did Martin live somewhere around here in the Ballysillan area? Or was the house in a street off the Crumlin Road? She couldn’t be sure. It would have to be a Protestant or mixed area. She’d heard him mention Harold Street, but she didn’t know where to find it. This wasn’t her part of the city. Besides, her thinking was still too confused because of the bombs. And even if she did find the right house, she couldn’t bring herself to knock at the door and ask for Martin.

  What would his aunt say?

  Maybe she should just scout around for a while in the hope of seeing him in the streets. Or maybe she should walk down the Crumlin Road to that newspaper shop where he bought his aunt’s paper. Take it from there. It wasn’t too far to walk. Her confusion increased with every step she took.

  Ballysillan was a little more Protestant than Catholic, but essentially a mixed area. It was far from the sort of segregated ghetto she had grown up in. Nevertheless, the Protestants in some parts of Ballysillan had distinctly anti-Catholic views. Most of the houses were middle-class, not posh, but better than anything she could aspire to. Could she find Martin here? She wandered down a side street leading off the main Road.

  It was safe enough here, she reckoned. The Ballysillan car bomb had been discovered by British troops early this morning. It was unlikely the IRA had a ba
ck-up. Surely they didn’t, she told herself. But then she saw something that caused her to draw a raw breath.

  She was wrong. Very wrong.

  She recognised the car instantly, a light blue Vauxhall Viva parked near a street corner. It had been stolen a week ago by Finn McKenna and the number plates changed. Fitzpain had been driving around in it since then. It was an English vehicle, he had said, and that made it perfect for use as a car bomb. One tiny bit of England would be destroyed in the explosion.

  Sorcha felt her senses tighten. This was the replacement car bomb! It had to be.

  Was Brian behind this one? Her thoughts tumbled. Had he been released from Castlereagh? Had he planted the car here? Was he, even now, somewhere nearby? She studied the vehicle, wondering.

  She walked closer and her nerves continued to tingle. The street was empty apart from a few distant figures, too far away to recognise. No one else seemed to be taking any notice of the car. Smoke from so many bombs still lingered over the city, and the air was still tainted with the acrid smell of burning, but it was quiet here. The houses looked untouched by the day’s tragedies. She studied the scene, looking for clues. Was the bomb fitted with a timer? Or was Fitzpain hiding somewhere nearby with a wired detonator? Only a close inspection would tell her, and she feared getting too near the car.

  Where might the car’s driver now be hiding?

  She paused to scan the area. It all looked so innocuous. A small area of waste land just a few yards away was bounded by metal railings, five-foot-high and topped by arrowheads. Like the weaponry of a line of primitive warriors, Sorcha thought. Primitive weapons looking useless in the face of modern explosives. But there was no obvious hiding place in there. Nowhere for the bomber to conceal himself with a detonator.

  One hundred yards farther down the road a shop door opened, an elderly man came out and stumbled away. Within a minute he had disappeared along a side road. Nothing seemed out of place or sinister… except that car.