Recovering Commando Box Set

by Finn Óg

  He should have been happy about it, yet he found it disturbing. Surely she should be grieving or bottling it all up, he thought. Why are there no signs of trauma? The time had come.

  “Right, wee love, we need to have a talk.”

  “Ok.”

  “You’ve had a terrible time.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it, Daddy,” she replied immediately.

  “It’s so hard for someone your age to see something like that.”

  Silence.

  “And you’ve been through too much already.”

  “You mean Mammy,” she said, a little too matter-of-factly for his liking.

  “Yes, I mean Mammy.”

  “Daddy, I don’t want to talk about it.”

  The soft scratch of a felt tip on paper.

  For the first time ever, he had no idea what was going on in her head. “I want for you to talk to someone properly – so that they can take all the bad stuff out of your head.”

  She looked up at him then, straight in the eye.

  “I don’t have bad stuff in my head. I only have the nice memories of Mammy.”

  That took Sam by surprise. “Well, that’s brilliant, wee lamb, but you’ve also been through a terrible thing.”

  “The bomb.”

  Sam was struggling with her directness. “Eh, yeah, the bomb. And, like, Molly.”

  “I just do the same with Molly as I do with Mam. I just remember the good things and stuff.”

  “But it might not always be like that.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, in the future you might remember the bad stuff too.”

  “You shouldn’t remind me of that, Daddy,” she scolded him.

  “I’m not trying to remind you of it, darlin’. I’m just trying to make sure it doesn’t do you any harm.”

  “But if I don’t think about it, then it won’t do me harm.”

  Sam stared at her, lost as to how to work around her logic.

  “You don’t always get a choice of what you think about, Isla.”

  “I do. If I’m thinking about bad stuff, I just say, ‘Get out,’ and then I think about fun stuff instead.”

  Sam shook his head a little. It was like reasoning with her mother – he was ten steps behind before they even started moving. “Well, I’d like you to talk to a person to make sure your mind is going to be ok.”

  “Where is Sinead, Daddy?”

  “She had to go back to work.”

  “Did you send her away?”

  “No, Isla,” he said, surprised. “Why would you think that?”

  She just shrugged.

  He felt himself getting slightly prickly at the suggestion but wasn’t sure why. He got up and made for the companionway having achieved next to nothing.

  “Do I have to go?” she said to his back.

  He knew she wouldn’t have lifted her head from the drawing. “Yes, wee love. I think it’s for the best.”

  At five o’clock in the morning a small tactical support convoy split in two. The front half stayed on the dual carriageway, the other rolled towards a housing estate. The timing was ideal – any wee scallies keen on starting trouble were asleep, and the boys in boiler suits could make their snatches and extract before a petrol bomb was poured.

  Grim had waited for hours, smoking and thinking, running through the motions of how to distract himself during interview, zoning out the officers who would question him. Eventually he had taken his thoughts to bed.

  There would be an effort to turn him – he expected that. They would try to kick him around for a while, then some unidentified character would come in – calmer and more confident. There would be a dance of sorts: this new arrival would do a lot of looking, spend a lot of time silent, then drop what they imagined to be a killer line – “You’ve an interesting browsing history,” or some such shite. Grim had learned to ignore them in just the same way as the ordinary peelers. He’d pick something on the wall or door over their shoulder and hold it for as long as he was able. “You never fancy getting out of here, away from all this? Can be arranged – new life, maybe in the sun?” He knew it was nearly over when they started getting on to money; the last roll, the final effort to tip him into betrayal.

  Their problem was he had no closet full of perversions. Beyond his willingness to kill for political gain, his mind was largely clear of sick pursuits and there was no lever to lean on. And he had no desire to leave Ireland – to take the money and relocate to what he knew would be an equally awful housing estate in the north of England where the people would be less inclined to welcome him and where he would be utterly dependent upon increasingly disinterested handlers.

  Grim’s motivations were concentrated in revenge and politics and those were hard commitments to crack. In the absence of sexual deviance or a serious gambling addiction, there wasn’t much the Brits could do to flick his switch.

  They may have knocked – but if they had it was deliberately soft, before the frame was beaten through in two taps. He heard them come in and leapt to get his trousers on before they dragged him into the street in his trunks. He hated when they did that – exposing his skinny, long white legs to the neighbours. He had just zipped when a bottle-green baseball hat appeared at the door and he was swivelled and pinned forward onto the bed, cuffed, elbowed and dragged down the stairs. His wife had simply rolled over.

  Outside, he was content to see the neighbours opening their curtains and lifting their blinds to investigate the heavy rumble of police Land Rovers. He was bare-chested, his broad shoulders and upper body a marked contrast to his pathetic little legs. He remembered reading the words of Joseph Goebbels: “If we cannot be respected, we can at least be feared.”

  The boss, on the other hand, had to put on a show. It was expected. A man of his stature couldn’t be taken quietly – that simply wouldn’t do. He was lifted out in his pants by four large men, kicking and swinging. He still had his socks on.

  Two young lads emerged in support and starting clodding stones at the TSG cops, pinging the windscreen of the armoured Land Rover. The driver simply lifted the grill. The boss was bucked in the back like the carcass of a cow, his pale body flopping around under the boots of the officers as they pretended to hold him still for the journey to Antrim’s Serious Crime Suite. There he would be given a telly-tubby forensic suit and left to freeze in a cell for hours while they waited for his brief to get out of bed.

  They didn’t bother trying to pick up the manager – the Guards had pinged him in a village over the border in the Irish Republic. The Major Investigations Team would start the extradition process in due course.

  “Isla thinks I sent you away.”

  “Why?”

  “Dunno. I was trying to have the counselling talk.”

  “Ah, Sam, I’m sorry.”

  “Not your fault. Just, well, odd – you know, the way she interprets things.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know, just that she thinks I would send you away. That’s so wide of the mark.”

  “I think that’s a compliment?”

  “So do I.”

  Sam shook his head at how quickly their conversations could become complicated.

  Sinead rescued the confusion. “There’s someone wants to see you.”

  “Hardly your sister?” Sam couldn’t really think of anyone else.

  “No. Well, not that she doesn’t want to see you—”

  “Don’t worry, I know I’ll never be a favourite of Áine’s.”

  “She likes you more than she realises.”

  “Aye. Who then?”

  “The father.”

  “Who?”

  “Kaitlin’s dad. The heiress, as you call her.”

  “Shit.”

  “Why shit?” Sinead said warily. “You never told me how it ended in Venice.”

  “Scrappy – not for the phone, to be honest, but I left her safe. Have you heard how she is?”

  “Well, I know she
’s back in Dublin – he told me that much.”

  “Did he say what he wants? Is he, like, angry?”

  “Why would he be angry if you left her safe?”

  “She had a visitor out there.”

  Sinead was silent for a moment while the cogs meshed. “You’re joking?”

  “He didn’t mention that?”

  “I don’t even know if he knows about it.”

  “How was he – did he come to see you or what?”

  “He was concerned.”

  “About what?”

  “About you, Sam. He knew what happened.”

  “How?”

  “I told him.”

  “Right. So why did he come to see you?”

  “He didn’t – not at first. He rang and asked how you were, I filled him in. I sort of assumed you’d have told him, but then I realised you hadn’t … sorry.”

  “Wasn’t really a priority.”

  “Of course. The funny thing is, he did come to see me after that. He said he’d heard the thing on the radio and he wants to see you.”

  “What thing on the radio?”

  “Molly’s mum – the interview – he heard it.”

  “What? She’s in intensive care.”

  “Sam, how long’s it been since you listened to the news?” Sinead asked, bewildered.

  “Few days,” he said. “I don’t really want Isla hearing anything, and I’m sort of not wanting to hear anything myself.”

  Sinead paused, deliberating.

  “Sal’s come round, Sam. She’s done an interview. It’s everywhere. It’s—”

  “What?”

  “D’ye know what? I think maybe you’re right. I think you might be better off not listening to it.”

  It was Sam’s turn to say nothing for a while. Then something occurred to him. “I should go and see her.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When does the father want to see me?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Do you think he’d come here? I’m not that keen on leaving Isla.”

  “You could bring her to Dublin – get off the boat for a while. I could mind her – take her out. If, you know, you’d be happy with that.”

  “Can I just make one thing clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “I did not send you away.”

  She laughed, a little relieved. “Sure, I know that.”

  “A day out for her is a good idea. I could take her on the train – I still don’t have a van. And the father hasn’t paid me yet, if he’s ever going to.”

  “Well, I’m looking forward to hearing what went on over there.”

  “Don’t be,” he said. “It was—”

  “Scrappy,” she repeated.

  The police had dissident arrests down to a fine art; the plan was to make them all suspicious of one another. By staggering releases and letting the most unlikely detainees go free first, the cops could sow doubt into the heads of their comrades. Dissident republicans knew that their ranks had been infiltrated, that Special Branch, the spooks and probably even military intelligence had all pocketed a slice of their membership. Equally, the dissies knew there was next to nothing they could do about it. Every now and again, if they felt there was enough evidence of someone passing information to the security forces, they would shoot one of their own – plug him in a pub or rattle off a shotgun through a living room window.

  The cops knew that and played on it.

  First to be released was the boss. Amid muted fanfare and cheering he was spirited from the Serious Crime Suite, a clutch of tracksuits and trainers surrounding him as he was led away to a waiting car.

  Grim they kept, in the hope he would believe he’d been thrown to the courts by his master. That, it was hoped, would fracture loyalty and foster suspicion. Which it did. By day three, an extension obtained, Grim was tiring of hovering over a hole to shit, of his puke-encrusted mattress and of the freezing cold cell. He’d had his hair sampled, his prints taken, his image recorded – and he was still in a dust suit. The bed blankets were little more than rubber-backed bathmats, and the peelers had refused to give him anything to read. He was going bingo. He’d asked for a shower, yet to be granted, and was on his sixth snack box of chicken legs and chips. His guts would never hold out to that type of feeding.

  Of course, the custody sergeant had taken great delight in keeping his hatch flap open as the boss was paraded past. Grim hadn’t been able to contain his curiosity when a day later he posed the question he knew he ought not to.

  “Where was he going?

  “Who?” the custody sergeant asked, knowing full well who was being referred to.

  “The bloke who was arrested same night as me,” Grim said, trying to keep the charade together.

  “Oh, your old pal? He was released, sure.”

  “So when are you going to release me?”

  “Sure, why would you be released?”

  “Well, why was he released?”

  “Ah, now,” was all he got, and the flap was flipped shut.

  Talking was fine so long as it wasn’t on tape, he tried to console himself. Yet he was pissed off at having said anything. That was not the plan.

  Isla took Sam’s hand on the platform and they waited for the train. On impulse he’d bought them first-class tickets. Might be fun, he thought. Treat her a little bit, get her a posh breakfast and a complimentary glass of orange juice served by a bloke in a waistcoat.

  “Where are we going?” she asked as she buzzed her enormous seat between recline and upright.

  “Well, you’re going shopping with your pal. The one I didn’t send away, little lady.”

  “Sinead?” she said excitedly.

  “Yes. She’s going to take you round Dublin for a while. Dublin’s much bigger than Belfast, with lots of big shops and stuff on the streets.”

  “Thank you, Daddy,” she said, the kindling of a glow in her cheeks.

  Toast and sausages devoured, he pulled out her Kindle and entered the Wi-Fi code. “Now, you can chill and watch this for a while. I’ve got to listen to something before my meeting.”

  “Who are you meeting?”

  “A man about a job.”

  “Are you going away again?” she asked, immediately alarmed.

  “No, wee love, I’m not going away.”

  She stared at him with a look that said, “I’ve heard that before.” At least it felt that way to Sam. Eventually she pulled her feet into the enormous seat and drifted into a world of making stuff with discarded rubbish.

  Sam pulled on his headphones, braced himself and hit play on the programme he’d downloaded to his phone.

  “Five weeks have passed since a car bomb, believed to have been left by dissident republicans, took the lives of eight people, including two children. Despite multiple arrests, nobody has been charged with the attack in the County Antrim seaside town of Ballycastle. One of the children who died was seven-year-old Molly Black. She was having breakfast with her mother and a friend in a café close by when the device went off. Her mother Sal, a consultant paediatrician, was left in a critical condition – and tragically was on life support when her daughter’s funeral took place. Thankfully, she is recovering from her physical injuries, and our reporter Niamh Cullen has been speaking to her in her hospital room in Belfast. I warn you, this is not an easy listen, folks, but it is an important one.”

  Sam hit the pause button and looked out the window for a while. Then he looked at Isla, engrossed, and carried on.

  “It was just a normal morning,” Sal began. “The kids wanted to go to the beach and I was out of bread, so I decided to treat them and we went to the wee café down by the harbour. We’d go in there for ice cream in the evenings sometimes, but we’d never been there for breakfast before and it just seemed like a normal thing to do.”

  “You were on holidays, weren’t you?” said the reporter.

  “Yeah. We’d be there quite often. It’s nice, you know. Molly loved the beach
and she had a wee pal with her and they were just having a ball.”

  Sam looked across at her wee pal and wondered what the hell her wee head was really making of all she’d seen.

  “It’s, it’s not the type of place you’d expect to be targeted in an attack, is it?”

  “Not at all. I mean, you don’t really think anywhere’s a target any more, do you? You kind of think all that’s behind us, that the peace process did its job. So, you know, it was just such a total shock.”

  “Do you remember anything of what happened?”

  “I remember the girls getting their food, and I had a coffee and a scone, and we were just chatting, you know? And then there was this enormous gust of wind. There wasn’t any noise, though, which is still strange to me. Just this blast of wind. And I was reaching for Molly and then that’s all. That’s everything.”

  “You were unconscious for more than three weeks.”

  Sam chewed the inside of his cheek, astonished at Sal’s composure.

  “Can you tell me what happened when you came round?”

  “My husband was sitting roughly where you’re sitting. He was upset, you know. They’d been bringing me round deliberately, so he knew I was probably about to wake up. And he knew he would have to tell me.”

  There was a pause, then the reporter did her job.

  “Tell you what?”

  There was a long pause, then Sal’s voice broke. “Tell me Molly was gone. That my wee girl was dead.”

  Now, I want you to stop any time you like. If you want to stop, please just let me know and we’ll switch the recorder off.”

  “I want people to know what these things do, Niamh. Don’t stop it.”

  Sam hit pause again, covered his eyes and gave thanks that he hadn’t had to go through what Sal was going through.

  “Daddy, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, wee love, watch your programme,” he said.

  “Are you sad?”

  “I’ve just a pain in my back.”

  He hit play again.

  “Did you understand what was happening?”