Northern Spy

by Flynn Berry

  Though I’m not sure if that’s entirely true. I remember the expression in the guard’s eyes before he told us to run. He hadn’t wanted to hurt us.

  I hope we’re not the only ones. I hope that others of the IRA’s disappeared are alive, that instead of shooting them, the gunmen told them to run. It’s possible, I think. There might be dozens like us, who survived.

  * * *

  —

  The police have brought me a change of clothes. A navy cardigan, white v-neck t-shirt, and tracksuit bottoms. And a nude cotton bra and knickers in a sealed polystyrene bag. Odd, to think of someone in the police finding out my bra size.

  I sit on the hospital bed with Finn, waiting to be discharged. My mam leans against the window. “Neither of you had coats,” she says. “You could have frozen to death.”

  “Well, we didn’t,” I say, bouncing Finn on my lap.

  “You’ve been limping.”

  “Only from blisters. We had to walk for a long time when we left,” I say, which doesn’t come out sounding as reassuring as I’d hoped.

  Marian steps into the room, in her own police-issued clothes, followed by the detective. “The IRA has issued a statement,” he says, handing me his phone. I scroll past the picture of Seamus, in a mustard-yellow corduroy blazer, to read the statement. “A devoted volunteer, Seamus Malone, was tragically killed in an unintended explosion in South Armagh yesterday morning.” The statement goes on about Seamus’s legacy, his standing among his comrades, and the plans for a full paramilitary funeral, with a guard of honor. The service will be held at St. Peter’s cathedral, with a procession to the burial at Milltown cemetery. Near the bottom, the statement says, “Two others, Marian Daly and Tessa Daly, also died in the explosion after having been court-martialed and found guilty of informing.”

  “Oh,” I say softly. It’s like stepping into a lift shaft. I look at the detective, Marian, my mam. “Everyone who knows us will think we’re dead. I can’t do that to them.”

  “You don’t have a choice, love,” says my mam. “It’s this or the IRA looking for you. You’re safe now, that’s all that matters.”

  Finn shifts on my lap, and I smooth his hair. I can’t go home, I can’t even go back to say goodbye. “What will happen now?”

  “You’ll be given new names,” says the detective. “And resettled outside of Northern Ireland.”

  Marian presses her mouth into a thin line. She loves Belfast even more than I do, she has never lived anywhere else. I take a sip of ice water through the straw, and think, We’re not so badly off. We could have been killed yesterday.

  “Do you want to be placed together or separately?” asks the detective.

  “Together,” we say at the same time.

  42

  It’s raining in Dalkey, on the cliffs and the railway line, the lighthouse and the harbor, the slate roofs and chimneys, and on the skylight above the table where Marian and I are having breakfast. The table itself is crowded with plates. Neither of us could decide, so we’re sharing the polenta, the crêpes, and a lemon danish, wedged onto the table along with a cafetière of coffee, milk, and cups. I cut up toast and set it on the high-chair tray. Finn nods to himself, studying the options, before lifting his first bite. Marian tips honey over her crêpe, I spread cherry jam on mine and then roll it up like a cigar. Around us, the other tables are full of people chatting. Marian finishes her half of the polenta, and we trade plates across the table.

  The IRA thinks we’re dead. They think that we were in a locked room when the farmhouse exploded.

  “More coffee?” asks Marian.

  * * *

  —

  After leaving the café, I strap Finn into his carrier and we walk through the village. We’ve been settled in the republic, in a small village on the coast thirty minutes south of Dublin. The IRA has plenty of supporters in the republic, but what I’ve already noticed is how little people here concern themselves with events in the north. Their lives have carried on as usual, while across the border ours imploded. It would infuriate me, if it weren’t part of what will keep us safe here. Our other option for resettlement was a town in the southeast of England, and I couldn’t imagine my son speaking with an English accent one day.

  We’ve been in Dalkey for a week now. We prepared a backstory for ourselves, but none of the locals seem particularly surprised that we’ve ended up here. They’re used to visitors deciding to stay.

  Dalkey sits on a headland at the southern tip of Dublin Bay, with views across the water of the city, and the ferries leaving Dun Laoghaire. I find everything about Dalkey appealing, everything to scale—the curved main street, the train station, the church, the houses, the cedar elms and umbrella pines. I can’t tell if this is down to my near-death experience or the village itself.

  “It will start to annoy you eventually,” says Marian.

  “Probably,” I say cheerfully.

  The police are providing us with housing for a year. Mine is a small new-build house on the village’s outskirts. You can’t tell that it’s owned by the police, used to lodge informers and protected witnesses. I wonder about the others who have stayed there before me, if they felt scared, or overwhelmed. It’s a lot of work, faking your own death. A lot of admin.

  Every hour, I remember something else. The food in my fridge. The unreturned library books. The newspaper subscription. It would be easier for me to handle these tasks myself, but, the thing is, I’m supposed to be dead. So instead I have to call my mam, my next of kin, and she has to ring on my behalf, and try to explain to the customer-service representative that I’ve died, and that, no, she doesn’t have my account number. She spent a wearying afternoon yesterday trying to cancel my auto insurance.

  “Sorry, mam,” I said, and she said, “Couldn’t you have left Tom as your next of kin? It would serve him right.”

  On our first night across the border, I called Tom from the hospital. “I’m in the republic,” I said. “With the baby.”

  “Oh. For work?”

  “No. Do you want to sit down?”

  When I finished explaining, there was a long silence. Then, in a cold voice, he said, “You shouldn’t have gotten involved. What were you thinking? How will I see my son?”

  “It’s a short train from Belfast.”

  “Fuck you, Tessa.”

  Tom is going to be angry with me for a long, long time. Eventually, maybe, the trips here will start to seem normal. He will have Finn for longer stretches. Or, maybe, maybe, he and Briony will move to Dublin.

  Our mam is planning to move nearby, maybe Bray. “Have you seen the house prices?” she said. “Absolutely shocking.”

  She said that whenever she’s out in Andersonstown, and has to remember to look sad over supposedly losing her daughters, she thinks of the housing market in the republic.

  In Dalkey, I walk with Marian and Finn down the main street and out to the promontory. From here, you can see the DART trains that run along the bay all the way to Howth.

  “What are you going to do now?” I ask Marian.

  “No idea.”

  “Do you want to be a paramedic again?”

  “No,” she says, “no, definitely not. What about you?”

  “No idea.”

  * * *

  —

  On the phone, Fenton asks me about the town, and I answer, feeling oddly nervous, like I want him to be impressed by how well we’re settling in.

  “Are you scared, Tessa?” he asks.

  “No.”

  “It’s normal if you are.”

  “I’m not.”

  “You might be a bit numb at the moment,” he says.

  But it’s the opposite. I feel keenly, achingly alive. When this conversation ends, I am going to walk with Finn around Dalkey, to look at the wreaths and the glowing trees inside the houses.

&
nbsp; Fenton says, “Some people find coming back even more difficult than being in captivity. It can be more painful, in a way.”

  I nod, thinking that he means people who were abducted for long periods of time. I’d only been held for about twenty-four hours. My recovery time will be shorter, I think. It might have already finished.

  Fenton says, “I’m here to help, Tessa.”

  But why would I need help? I have my son. I have my body, I have food, weather, a stack of books to read. I have my sister and my mother.

  After our call, Finn naps in his pram while I push him around the village, along the coast and over the railway bridge, past the barber shop and butcher’s and wine shop and crèche. I can’t get enough of any of it.

  43

  Finn stands at the back door with his palms on the glass, looking out, like he used to in Greyabbey. The view here is different—a small patch of overgrown garden, not a sheep field—but he doesn’t seem to mind. I crouch behind him, and we watch birds dart through the winter shrubs. This is, apparently, my garden. I should learn the names of the shrubs. And the birds, for that matter.

  Finn toddles away from the door, and sets about pushing the buttons on the dishwasher. “No, no,” I say, and he looks at me, then pushes another button.

  He causes as much havoc here as at home. I’m glad that he is the same, that he made the trip here intact. I hadn’t known if it would change him, watching two men in ski masks come to take his mam, but it doesn’t seem to have left any mark. He’s still as good-natured and curious and maddening as ever. Already today he has poured a bottle of dish soap on the floor and dropped blueberries behind the sofa.

  He can’t do too much damage, though. The house has been simply outfitted, with a good deal of thought. There is a safety gate for the stairs, a crib, a high chair, a laundry basket, even. Was I worth this much? I have no way of knowing my own significance in the conflict. MI5 had been ready to let me die, after all, so how useful could I have been?

  On the phone, I try to explain this to Fenton. “There’s a hair dryer here,” I tell him. “And a cheese grater and a colander. Why?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Why did the police go to this much trouble for me?”

  “You risked your life as an informer,” he says. “I’d say we can give you a hair dryer for that.”

  “The mortgage here can’t be very cheap.”

  “I hate to remind you,” he says, “but you had a house, and a job here, that you’ve had to leave.”

  “You also risk your life, as a detective. This must be more than your pension.”

  “It’s not, actually. Added up.”

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “You and Marian contributed a great deal toward peace,” he says.

  “I don’t want this to be a reward for killing Seamus.”

  “It’s not, Tessa.”

  “But the police must have wanted him dead.”

  “No, actually. He would have been more useful in prison.”

  “I’m going to pay you back this money,” I say, and the detective sighs.

  * * *

  —

  A police liaison officer based in Belfast is helping me with practical matters. She works with protected witnesses and informers on building new identities, providing them with a passport under a new name, a medical number, a credit history, a degree, a list of former residences.

  “I lived in Larne? Really?”

  “Mm-hmm,” she says. “What’s wrong with Larne?”

  “Nothing. It’s just, Larne.”

  We will work together on creating a fake résumé for me, with fake references. “What are you qualified to do?” she asks.

  “Produce political radio shows.”

  “That might be difficult,” she says. “Anything else?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well. Give it a think.”

  We’re being given a small stipend for our living expenses over the next few months, which is lucky, since neither of us had much in savings, and MI5 cleared Marian’s pledge account. They must have assumed that she was about to be killed, and that the funds could be used elsewhere.

  I will never hear from Eamonn. He will never explain himself to me. I remember reading the MI5 site, months ago. “Building up our relationship with you is at the center of this process.” Sometimes I think that Eamonn might have argued for our lives, and been overridden by his superiors, but probably not, he probably accepted the rules. We still don’t even know who the other informer was, who they decided to sacrifice us for. The peace talks are proceeding. Most likely, Eamonn is still in Northern Ireland, still running informers.

  I think often of the story he told me about meeting a source at a luxury hotel, in a straw bungalow on a jetty. I think about how close we came to something similar. And I hope that whomever she was, she saw through him sooner than I did, and got herself free.

  * * *

  —

  One afternoon, I buy a Christmas tree from the stalls behind the church. Marian comes over to help me with the lights, unspooling them from her hands while I circle the tree.

  “Do you feel guilty?” I ask her.

  “No,” she says simply.

  “Seamus was your friend.”

  “Yes. And he was going to kill both of us.”

  44

  Our mam moved to Bray in January. She still complains about the town every day, which was genuine at first, and now seems to be mostly out of guilt. She will never admit to liking it more than Andersonstown.

  For the first few weeks, she worked as a cleaner, but then she answered a post from a dog-walking service. She has a picture of each dog taped on her fridge.

  I’m glad she’s here for my sake, but even more for Marian’s. This has been harder on her. She can’t tell Damian and Niall that she escaped, that she is alive.

  “Do you miss them?” I ask.

  “Yes.”

  She’s most worried about Niall, though Fenton said he’s preparing to offer him a deal, immunity in exchange for information. She told the detective to mention New York. “He’s always wanted to live there.” If he accepts, Niall will be given some money, a new start. He’s so young. This part of his life will fade, in time.

  “I’m going to see them again,” she says firmly. “One day. When we’re old.”

  The conflict will end eventually. An argument over pardons for IRA prisoners has slowed the peace talks, but negotiations are still inching along. What is dangerous for us now won’t be forever. Someday, a peace deal will be agreed, the IRA will dissolve, and we’ll be safe to cross the border again.

  * * *

  —

  In March, I have the radio on while washing our breakfast dishes. The presenter starts to read the day’s headlines, a dip in the FTSE, a cabinet reshuffle. I set Finn’s bowl on the drying rack. “A senior figure in the IRA has been revealed as an MI5 informer,” she says, and I wrench the taps off to listen. “For over twenty years, Cillian Burke worked for the British government as a mole inside the IRA.”

  Chills wing up both sides of my skull. “A whistleblower in the Home Office has leaked Burke’s name to the press, out of concern about his role in a number of crimes. Burke fled his home in Ardoyne, north Belfast, last night and is currently in an undisclosed location. Questions are now being asked of MI5, and if they sanctioned Burke to commit criminal acts, including bombings and multiple murders.”

  I understand now why the MI5 witness refused to explain the evidence against Cillian at his trial, why they let the case against him collapse. “The greater good,” said Eamonn. He was their agent.

  On the radio, a political analyst says, “Let’s not be naïve. If you’re going to run an informer in a terror group, you’re going to be operating in a gray area, and you’re going to need to make certain sacri
fices.”

  Which sounds reasonable, except their sacrifices included Marian and me.

  “I don’t understand,” says Marian on the phone. “Cillian bled IRA. He was the most hard-line of any of them.”

  “Those might have been his instructions,” I say. His handlers might have told him, You need to be the most ruthless, you need to be the most violent, or they’ll find out about you.

  * * *

  —

  That evening while I am giving Finn a bath, without really thinking, I reach over and turn the lock on the doorknob, so the bad men can’t get in.

  That is the first sign. It’s almost nothing, except the next night I move Finn’s crib from his room to beside my bed, so I’ll hear if someone tries to take him. I think about this obsessively. When I tell Fenton, he sounds appalled. “No one’s looking for you, Tessa. The IRA thinks you’re dead.”

  I start having flashbacks. Not of Seamus’s death—those few seconds were so shocking that they recur to me as flat images, outside of time—but of Finn strapped in his high chair, twisting to free himself. That’s what wakes me up at night, thinking about how the men might have forced me to leave him alone in his high chair, and what would have happened to him.

  Our story has held. We’re only minor figures, lost in the chaos of the conflict, others have left far more loose ends behind. But the fear still spreads out, like black ink in water.

  The roads here are narrow, and I worry about rolling the car into a ditch with Finn strapped in his car seat. I watch him eat a piece of bread and worry about him choking, picture myself running out into the road holding him, screaming for someone to help. I worry that his cold is actually meningitis. I worry about concussions when he bumps his head, and hold his face level with mine to check that his irises are the same size.