by Chris Petit
She put the photographs aside. These were things she thought she would never have to think about consciously again. She pinched the bridge of her nose, trying to free the images from her mind.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said aloud.
She picked up the main photograph of Mary Ryan again. It had been taken from above and showed the whole body. The head lolled, its features partly burned out by the glare of the flash. The arms lay away from her side at an angle of forty-five degrees. The knees were bent and spread to reveal the dark shadow of her pubic area.
The first conclusion anyone would jump to was that the positioning was deliberate and sexually provocative, the work of a pervert. Yet there was nothing else in the case to suggest that.
‘Oh fuck,’ said Westerby. ‘Of course.’
It was obvious looking at the photograph again.
‘There were two of them.’
It had taken two people to carry Mary Ryan’s body.
One had taken hold of her arms and the other had held her under the knees, and the way the body had been left was the way it had been carried.
Candlestick had had an accomplice.
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SHE had resurfaced in 1981, this time as his handler, travelling up from Dublin. ‘Well, blow me down,’ she said, wondering if he’d pick up the echo of Tommy Herron in her words. Later he asked if she still thought she owed him one. She took him outside and made him do it standing up in an alley behind the hotel.
She made it clear she used men and drifted between them, sometimes for three weeks, sometimes three months. It was a cause of friction between them. She had caressed his face and told him he was different.
‘I’ve got plans for you.’
‘What plans?’
She’d laughed. ‘We’re going to fuck everyone.’
She told him she had never seen such a dead country, with its pathetic men, and so dominated by its cult of death which was to be seen everywhere, in the disproportionate length of its deaths columns, with their sentimental and elaborate obituaries and anniversary commemorations and invocations. She saw their work as the logical extension of this cult. It was their mission to expose its folly and to reveal its secrets. If the British were past masters at the art of secrecy, the Irish were not far behind with their men-only societies. Why, she asked, were Irish women so fatigued? It was a country of laughing men and knackered women. She had never seen so many chemists: the country was awash with pharmaceutical prescriptions. She taught him the underlying assumptions of Irish culture – that a wife and children were a man’s property, a tradition reinforced by laws of Church and State. She mocked the whole brothers-in-arms sham and showed him the sordid reality behind it – a level of family violence that had reached epidemic proportions. For the larger violence to end, the domestic violence at its root must end, and what was the death of so many children if it brought a people to its senses?
She honed his messianic zeal, gave him a purpose, led him to believe he was in control, and used him later, when the killings began, to satisfy the impulse that had been triggered in her the day they had killed Tommy Herron, that arching sense of ecstasy she knew would never be reached again unless it was prefaced by death. She’d watched while he’d broken Breen’s spirit and body, torn between prolonging her pleasure at the expense of his drawn-out pain and seeing him finished off so that she could satisfy her desire’s aching need.
In a world of secrets theirs were the most forbidden of all. The daring of her strategy was also her licence. In control she discovered what lay beyond: a voluptuous abandonment that man alone could not satisfy. Men usually failed her. Too often she saw the child in them. (He fucked best when she was bleeding, as she had been with Tommy Herron, and she started to make sure her visits coincided with her periods.)
‘There are very few Christians in Northern Ireland. Its people hate each other in the name of Jesus Christ.’ That was Bernadette McAliskey née Devlin, she told him. The trouble began in childhood, she went on, particularly for the boys who grew up in a world they saw only as black and white, where the only adults who appeared to control their destiny, and act as if their actions made sense, were paramilitaries: they filled the children’s need for strong, protective parents.
She remembered a Brazilian woman saying: ‘Of course women do all the work here. Of course nothing ever changes unless women change it.’ The same applied there, leading a woman Official to observe: ‘When we stand shoulder to shoulder with our guns we’re equal, but when the shooting is over, the men go off to the pub to talk of strategy and the women go off to the kitchen to cook their supper.’
When the business of Breen came up she had gone to him and said, ‘We’re on our own from now on.’ It was time for him to get out, she explained, and told him she needed him for her work. She called him ‘My little Candlestick’, to annoy him. He had no humour.
When he understood that he’d been put into the Officials as insurance for Breen he wanted to kill Breen without delay. She persuaded him to wait. She drove him to Breen’s home and showed him his wife and children, and smiled and said nothing until he worked it out for himself.
‘It’ll take time,’ she said.
After their deaths she went to Breen saying she was from London and under instructions to get him out. He was easy, so groggy with grief and guilt and sentiment that he followed like a lamb. She organized the farm across the border, checking on him from time to time to make sure his deterioration was going to plan. Within three months he was broken, punched out by drink.
When they drove his body to the dumping ground, they fucked in the van in among the trees, with Breen like Tommy Herron behind. After placing the body in the road, he wanted to go but she made him wait, standing hidden in the trees close by, waiting for its discovery. The sight and sound of his head being run over – the final, delicious full stop to his life – nearly made her swoon with pleasure. She walked back to the van on unsteady legs, while he urged her to hurry, and while he drove she fell sated into the deepest sleep of the justified.
She wondered what broke him. He was not the same towards the end, troubled, even. Perhaps it was the children he recoiled from. She couldn’t see why. He’d never shown any conscience before. Children had always struck her as particularly unpleasant, fine in theory, in imagination, but who in their right mind would want them?
Wee Mary Ryan had been the best since Tommy. Dead Mary watching her hunched down on his splayed body.
The eyes were her idea. She’d read in a story – she read a lot – of a woman at a bullfight taking the eye of the bull, which had been ejected by the force of the death thrust, and inserting it inside herself. He’d done that willingly enough, handed her Mary’s on a plate. They’d been in the garage where they had once collected the car which they’d used to kill Tommy Herron.
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THE more Westerby tried to imagine this woman the more she grew sure that the killings – for all their apparent sense of purpose – were after all sexually driven and had a sexual trigger. The observation He needs an audience came back to haunt her, and she grew to believe that the woman in Candlestick’s life was not passive but active, perhaps even the architect of their plan. Candlestick had written of himself that he was only the instrument. The killing and the fucking went hand in hand, she was sure, but could not say why.
Westerby felt this sexual itch herself, an almost uncontrollable desire that ambushed her when she least expected it. What demons, she wondered, had been unleashed in her. She began to pray for the first time since childhood, for Cross at first, then for herself. But deliver us from evil for Thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever, amen.
After immersing herself so much in Candlestick’s life, she felt sometimes that he was not dead – just as she was sometimes certain that Cross was waiting on the other side of the door and would enter any minute – and still communicating with her.
She understood him so well now that she knew which moves to ma
ke. She went to Willcox and forced herself to look into his abuser’s eyes. She had not met him before. His stolid air of violence frightened her and brought back all the memories she had tried to reject of battered women and small children with swollen vaginas and torn rectums.
She asked the only question left – ‘Was he with anyone on the day he came to kill Tommy Herron?’ – and came away with the answer, and a name. Maggie. And a description. Of someone she knew, not knew but had met.
She dreamed of a house. She couldn’t work out if this house was her own in the future or where Candlestick had lived with the woman, with its children’s room and no children and a little sign on the door, painted in twee lettering, saying Romper Room. Hush, hush, whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers. A lullaby voice drifted down the stairs, a woman crooning: Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting.
She was sick in the morning and knew what she had suspected for some time. That she was carrying Cross’s child.
Epilogue
MAGGIE picked up the phone, dialled and said, ‘This is Miranda Ramsay.’
Westerby wrote down the address. How shall I prepare myself, she thought, for what I have to do? How shall I arm myself? Had she kissed Cross as she put the gun to his head?
The house looked a bit like the house in her dream, bright in November sunshine. It was small and on the edge of the city, within sight of fields, standing by itself, but was different in little ways that allayed her sense of premonition. She shook the thought from her mind, telling herself that this was the time for cold reason, and smiled brightly as Miranda opened the door.
Westerby stepped inside, into the cool dark hall and the door shut after her.
In the time left to you, Maggie thought, as she closed the door behind then, you will come to see that there are layers of evil, like the levels in any building. Come into my cellar, then come into my bedroom and I will show you that there are mirrors for evil too. After the letting of blood, the slaking of lust.
Outside in the far distance a siren howled and Westerby was reminded of a line from a song.
Heard the little girl dropped something on her way back home from school.
I was once that girl, she thought. What happened to her?
So young and bold, fourteen years old.
She was twenty-eight. She knew that with this woman there would be no jumping out of sequence.
Numbers add up to nothing.
Twenty-eight divided by seven equals—
So lonely baby.
Acknowledgements
The following books proved useful, and sometimes essential, guides to the complex labyrinth of Northern Ireland. The Psalm Killer is a work of fiction, though I have on occasion used real people and drawn on factual incidents described by others.
Anderson, Don, 14 May Days: The Inside Story of the Loyalist Strike of 1974 (Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1994)
Anon, Northern Ireland: Reappraising Republican Violence; A Special Report (Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, London, 1991)
Armstrong, Gary, From the Palace to Prison (New Wine Press, Chichester, 1991)
Asher, Michael, Shoot to Kill: A Soldier’s Journey through Violence (Viking, London, 1990)
Bailey, Anthony, Acts of Union: Reports on Ireland, 1973–79 (Faber and Faber, London, 1980)
Barzily, David, The British Army in Ulster, vols 1 and 3 (David Barzily, Belfast, 1973 and 1978)
Beattie, Geoffrey, We Are the People: Journeys through the Heart of Protestant Ulster (Heinemann, London, 1992)
Belfrage, Sally, The Crack: A Belfast Year (Deutsch, London, 1987) As well as being a first-rate reporter of Belfast life, Belfrage has an excellent ear, so good that it was impossible sometimes not to borrow. While most fictional characters in The Psalm Killer are the product of imagination, the O’Neills owe an enormous debt, and some of their dialogue, to her chapter, ‘True Blue’.
Bishop, Patrick, and Eamonn Mallie, The Provisional IRA (Heinemann, London, 1987)
Bowyer Bell, J., IRA Tactics & Targets (Poolbeg, Dublin, 1990)
Bradley, Anthony J., Requiem for a Spy: The Killing of Robert Nairac (Mercier Press, Dublin, 1993) Contains material on Baker.
Brewer, John D., with Kathleen Magee. Inside the RUC, Routine Policing in a Divided Society (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991) Provides details of daily police work, and deviancy within the system, plus material on the role of women in the RUC, attitudes towards them, and on the operations of the sex abuse unit.
Bruce, Steve, The Red Hand: Protestant Paramilitaries in Northern Ireland (OUP, Oxford, 1992) Includes accounts of the forming of paramilitary organizations, the Shankill murders, the career of Tommy Herron, racketeering and collusion between enemies. The tax dodge on page 475 is a paraphrase of one described by Bruce.
Northern Ireland: Reappraising Loyalist Violence (Research Institute for the Study of Conflict and Terrorism, London, 1992)
Clarke, A.F.N., Contact (Secker & Warburg, London, 1983) Clutterbuck, Richard, Protest and the Urban Guerilla (Cassell, London, 1973)
Coogan, Tim Pat, The IRA (Fontana, London, revised edn, 1987)
Costello, Mary, Titanic Town: Memoirs of a Belfast Girlhood (Methuen, London, 1992)
De Paor, Liam, Divided Ulster (Penguin, London, 1970)
Dillon, Martin, and Denis Lehane, Political Murder in Northern Ireland (Penguin, London, 1973)
Dillon, Martin, The Dirty War (Hutchinson, London, 1988) Covers a wide range of covert activities, including particular operations by the security forces, among them those involving Baker and Heatherington. The most complete version of Baker’s flight and religious conversion can be found in Dillon. The description of Candlestick’s murder of a waiter is based on Baker’s shooting Philip Anthony Fay in August 1972, described by Dillon, who was also the main source for the murder described on page 164. Actions attributed to Baker by Dillon have been appropriated by me and given to Candlestick, which is not to say that Candlestick was in any way inspired by the actions of Baker or that Candlestick is anything other than a fictional character. The death of Councillor Healey is based on Dillon’s account of a similar abduction and murder. The case of Heatherington is a simplified version of one found in Dillon and elsewhere. The meeting between the IRA and the UDA in the Royal Bar on page 478 is reported by Dillon. There is also a rare reference to a speech by Unionist MP Enoch Powell, claiming that Airey Neave’s death was the result of conspriacy by factions in the British and US governments. However, the deduction that British intelligence had some hand in the creation of the INLA is entirely my fiction.
The Shankill Butchers: A Case Study of Mass Murder (Hutchinson, London, 1989)
Stone Cold (Hutchinson, London, 1992) Material on McKeague, the Kincora scandal, Baker and assassinations carried out on the orders of Tommy Herron.
Dorril, Stephen, and Robin Ramsay, Smear! Wilson and the Secret State (Fourth Estate, London, 1991)
Dorril, Stephen, The Silent Conspiracy: Inside the Intelligence Services in the l990s (Heinemann, London, 1993)
Feldman, Allen, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (University of Chicago Press, Chigaco, 1991) Contains taped interviews with witnesses of sectarian violence, including the Shankill killings, plus useful material on the language of violence. Breen on different forms of sectarian assassination (page 363) is taken from a transcribed anonymous interview quoted by Feldman. The candlestick maker quote on page 507 is from a Feldman interview, as is the one after. The name Doctor Death, used by Willcox and Eddoes, is real and is mentioned in interview, as is Eddoes’ story on page 488. Willcox’s account of the sectarian murder on page 507f. is drawn from interviews quoted by Feldman.
Fields, Rona M., Northern Ireland: Society Under Siege (Transaction Books, New Brunswick, NJ, 1980) I have taken first-hand descriptions from the chapter ‘Psychological Genocide’ – Cross’s dream in Chapter 1 features some of them – and am grateful to Field
s for her account of the story of the Kilkenny cats.
Fisk, Robert, The Point of No Return: The Strike which Broke the British in Ulster (Deutsch, London, 1975)
Foot, Paul, Who Framed Colin Wallace? (Macmillan, London, 1989) Includes a chapter on Kincora plus much information on black propaganda operations mounted by the security forces.
Forde, Ben, with Chris Spencer, Hope in ‘Bomb City’ (Marshall, Morgan & Scott, Basingstoke, 1979)
Fraser, Morris, Children in Conflict: Growing Up in Northern Ireland (Basic Books, New York, 1977)
Gearty, Conor, Terror (Faber and Faber, London, 1991)
Gebler, Carl, The Glass Curtain: Inside an Ulster Community (Hamish Hamilton, London, 1991)
Hamill, Desmond, Pig in the Middle: The Army in Northern Ireland, 1969–1984 (Methuen, London, 1985)
Hansford Johnson, Pamela, On Iniquity (Macmillan, London, 1967) The quotation about the Nazis and pornography, found by Cross among Warren’s notes, is taken from her opening chapter.
Holland, Jack, and Henry McDonald, INLA: Deadly Divisions (Torc, Dublin, 1994) Detailed account of the emergence of the INLA, the initial split in the ranks of the Official IRA, the resulting civil war, and later operations, including drug dealing. The shooting of Ronnie Bunting (page 374f.) is a fictionalized version of the facts presented by Holland and McDonald, including the widow’s assertion that her husband was killed by men with English accents.
