by Anne Emery
“They do, right enough, but I’ve not much of an appetite. . . . Em, I’m wondering if I could speak to youse . . .” He looked from priest to father and son.
“Separately?” Brennan asked.
“Right. I mean if . . .”
“That would be fine,” Ronan assured him. “Father Burke and I will sit back there till you’re ready.”
They got up, signalled to a warder, and explained that they would be waiting for a few minutes before taking their turns with the prisoner. The guard directed them to a cubicle near the other end of the room. Lorcan had his visit, followed by Ronan. Ronan appeared distracted when he returned, but then he directed his attention to Brennan and said, “Go ahead now, Brennan. And don’t be too worried about privacy. The warders are more concerned about smuggling than they are about conversation, so you should be able to speak freely, the two of you.”
When Brennan was seated across from Jonno, there was no confession of murder or mayhem. It was a domestic matter: Jonno told Brennan that his girlfriend was pregnant, and he wondered how they’d manage to get married with Jonno in prison. It was commendable that the young man wanted to “do the right thing” by the mother of his child, but Brennan saw a coldly practical side to this question. He asked as gently as he could. “How long are you in for, Jonno?”
“Eight years! But my brief is appealing it.”
Even with a child on the way, Brennan did not want to be party to an arrangement that would see a young woman tied to a man she would have to live without for eight long years. Of course, the imprisoned man might well want to see her tied, so he would not have to lie in his cell for all those years imagining her with another man. Brennan had to tread softly here.
“You could get married, but don’t rush things.”
“That’s not what the priests used to say!”
“I’m sure you’re right. But have as many visits as you can with your girlfriend, talk things over. You both may decide to wait, see how the appeal goes.”
“Yeah, I know. All right, thanks, Father. I’ll be seeing her two days from now.”
Brennan commiserated with the poor lad, but rushing a young couple to the altar — such as it might be in a place like this — would not be in anyone’s best interest, including that of the baby.
The Burkes left the mammoth prison camp after that and headed back to Belfast. Lorcan filled his father in on the prison news, in case Ronan had not been given an update.
“Danny’s there, but word is he’ll be released soon. After five years inside. Jimmy’s still at it, trying to make a batch of poitín that won’t have the lads boakin’ up all over their cells.”
Powerful stuff, the potcheen; the homemade spirit had an extremely high alcohol content. Brennan remembered hearing that it had been outlawed for three hundred years. He could well believe it could make you sick, or worse, if not properly distilled.
“Donnacha’s still teaching the lads Jailic.”
“You’re only after leaving the Jailtacht, Brennan,” said Ronan. “Likely the only Gaeltacht in the Lisburn area.”
“More than likely.” A Gaeltacht was a region where the Irish language was spoken by the population.
“Fiach is camp OC now,” Lorcan continued. “Doing his best to fill your shoes, Da.”
Brennan took that to mean that Ronan had been the officer commanding of the Republican prisoners when he himself was in the Kesh.
Lorcan kept chattering, and his father responded, but Brennan could hardly miss the troubled look on Ronan’s face. They finally arrived at the house and, thinking there might be things Ronan wanted to discuss with his immediate family, Brennan took himself off for a long, leisurely stroll around Andersonstown. He returned an hour later, in time to see Tomás Burke walking away from the house. Brennan went inside and found that Lorcan had gone and Gráinne was upstairs. Ronan clearly had something on his mind when he greeted Brennan in the sitting room. “What do you say we have our supper and then head out somewhere for a bit of craic?”
“I’d been thinking of taking in an early session at Madden’s. I’ll not pretend it will be my first visit of the day.”
“Sure I’m not one to be pegging stones from my house of glass. We’ll both go.”
So they joined Gráinne for their evening meal and talked about matters that had nothing to do with crime and punishment. Then Brennan and Ronan excused themselves, went out to the car, and asked the driver to take them to Madden’s in the city centre.
When they arrived, one of the security men stayed in the car while the other accompanied the Burkes into the bar. The man squeezed into a seat against the wall, where he could keep an eye on the window, the door, and the punters inside. Ronan was greeted warmly by the bar staff and many of the clientele. One of the drinkers asked, “Can we cast our votes for you now, Ronan, and get ahead of the crowds?”
“Ah, now, I wouldn’t want to get ahead of anyone. Or get ahead of myself! We’ve a bit of a ways to go before there will be any kind of a vote.”
“Fuck that,” another man said. “We’ll hold the election right now, right here. How many of youse say Ronan for taoiseach? All those in favour, raise a glass!”
It looked to Brennan as if every glass in the house was raised. A chant went up then. “Taoiseach! Taoiseach!”
The word was loaded with significance. It was an ancient term referring originally to the chieftains of the old Gaelic order; it now meant the prime minister of the Republic of Ireland. The Six Counties had always been ruled by Unionists at Stormont or by the government of the United Kingdom. The word taoiseach was anathema to those who wielded power in the North of Ireland. The politically minded punters here in Madden’s had, in their minds, the country reunited, with Ronan Burke as the head of government. Brennan could not imagine how far in the future it would be before such a monumental development might happen. Ronan took it all in good humour and made a courteous bow to his supporters.
There were a few men and women who asked to speak to Ronan privately, almost as if he was already their elected representative, and two fellows got up and gave Ronan their table, so he could speak with his constituents in relative privacy. The men stood by the bar, and Brennan joined them, buying each of them a pint. He took the same himself. He watched his cousin as he conducted his meetings. Brennan could see him nodding his head, laying a hand on a shoulder, writing things on cigarette packs or bar coasters, until the conferences were finished and Ronan signalled to the two fellows that their table was free again. But they were on their way out, so Brennan brought his glass and a bottle of fizzy water and sat down.
“Sorry this is all I can bring to the table for this conference, Taoiseach.”
“Sure you’re grand, Your Holiness. It’s a bit of aggravation I brought on myself, with my overindulgence in the past.” But he grimaced before taking his first sip. Brennan didn’t slag him any further about it. Down through the history of Ireland there were tales told of heroic drinkers. To Brennan’s mind, Ronan’s successful efforts to get off and stay off the drink were truly heroic. Brennan would like to think he himself could manage it . . . but, well, there was no need really in his case, was there?
One by one the musicians had arrived for the session of traditional music; their ages ranged from twenty to seventy, one woman and the rest men. They got settled at tables at the front of the room, checked their tuning, sipped their pints, and began to play. There was a fiddle, an accordion, a bodhran, and a couple of guitars. After a few jigs and reels, it was time for some vocals. Brennan joined Ronan and others in the bar singing along with the ballads and occasional rebel songs, and he got pleasantly gilled as the night wore on. At one point the accordion player called out, “How many of youse have been in the Crum?” The Crumlin jail, more properly styled the Crumlin Road Gaol, was down the road from Brennan’s local church, Holy Cross. That was as close as he’d ever want to get
to the imposing Victorian prison. Others in the room had not been so fortunate, if the number of raised hands was any indication. The band duly sang their anthem, “Our Lads in Crumlin Jail.”
That got an animated response so the musicians followed it up with “The Men Behind the Wire” by local man Paddy McGuigan. The song was about men who had been interned — thrown in prison — without trial during the Troubles.
Not surprisingly, the theme of the night’s entertainment set Ronan brooding, maybe about his own times served in prison, or maybe about the young fellows wasting away in the H Blocks now. And, perhaps, about whatever they had done that put them there.
Brennan spoke in a quiet voice. “What was troubling you after your visit to the Kesh? Apart from the obvious, I mean, seeing a friend in there and him so young. I’m hoping I can help you, though I suspect the problem is not something within the realm of the spirit.”
“Something in the realm of hard, cold physical reality. To be more precise, the classic smoking gun.”
“Literally, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
“You remember when you came into the little office I have in the house, and I told you there are some things I want to see resolved before I assume what could be a leadership role in the peace process here? One of those matters is of course the 1974 bombings and the need to bring somebody to justice for that. And it hardly needs to be said that the Unionist-Loyalist side has grievances as you can imagine, which have never been addressed. Crimes against members of their community that have never been solved.”
“Of course.” Crimes committed by Republican paramilitaries.
“Well, another matter is even more personal, closer to home. And, again, this is a very sensitive subject.”
Whatever it was would be painful, Brennan knew, judging from the troubled look in his cousin’s eyes. “Again, Ronan, be assured that anything you tell me will be kept in the strictest confidence. But you know that already.”
“I do.” He glanced round the bar to make sure nobody could hear him. “I haven’t led a blameless life, to put it mildly, as I’m sure you know. And neither have . . . some of the other people in my life.” Brennan merely nodded and waited for him to continue. “I hate myself for saying this, for revealing it, but I have no choice.”
“Remember, I hear confessions for a living, Ronan.”
“Well, here’s another one for you. There was a young man killed. Espen van der Meer. He was a tourist from the Netherlands, who’d been backpacking around Ireland, and was going to visit Scotland, Wales, and England. He’d been away from home for a couple of months.” Brennan stayed silent and waited for the rest. “The person who shot him did so in self-defence. Except that . . . Well, I’ll try to explain it. It’s not clear how this young backpacker ended up where he was. He may have been a hostage of sorts. We’re just not sure. I know this isn’t making a lot of sense to you, Brennan.”
Brennan remained silent as he thought about yet another in a long line of innocent victims in this long-running conflict.
“The fellow who did the killing knew what kind of a storm would blow up over this. He and another person took van der Meer’s body away and buried it in a place where it would almost certainly never be discovered. The body has never been found, and his family to this day have no idea what happened to their son. It was a few weeks apparently before they raised the alarm, because the lad was travelling on his own with no planned itinerary and he wasn’t in touch with home very often. The parents are of course desperate to believe, against all reason, that he is alive somewhere. That Espen was taken and will someday be returned. I’m sure they know, deep in their hearts, that that is not going to happen. But you can imagine how they cling to the thinnest skeins of hope.”
Ronan looked over at the bar as if a good stiff drink, after years on the dry, might serve to ease his pain. But he tore his eyes from the tempting, glistening array of bottles and taps and returned his gaze to Brennan. He said, “The person who killed this boy and buried his body was my son Tom.”
That one of Ronan’s sons was implicated was not entirely unexpected, given the preamble to the story, but Brennan felt it nonetheless as a blow to his heart.
“Tom has regretted it every day of his life since. It’s important to me that you understand that.”
“I do.”
“What I am determined to do, anonymously of course, is give that boy’s family at least this much: the location of his body, so they can mourn and give him a proper burial. And I want to get a message to them somehow that it is known that he was an innocent bystander, not involved in anything illegal. And that his killing was not sanctioned by any paramilitary group. It’s little enough but it’s all they’ll ever have. But I’m a parent, too, and there is something I have to do first. I have to protect my own. The only way I can do that is to retrieve and destroy the gun that will connect Tom to that killing. The possibility that Tom could go into the Kesh for the rest of his life, him with a new wife, and two little stepchildren — we all just call them his children — who adore him . . .”
“I understand, Ronan. It’s a terrible situation all round. If there is any way I can help you, I will.”
“Tom committed the crime, Brennan, even though it was done in self-defence, or so he thought . . . He deserves to be punished for it, I know. But he’s my son and I’m not going to, well, pull the trigger on my own child. He’ll have to live with it for the rest of his life, to employ an overused phrase.”
A parent protects its young. End of story. Brennan understood that perfectly.
Ronan took a sip of his fizzy water and said, “I have to think of some way to get that gun and dispose of it.”
“How would the police be able to connect the gun to Tom?”
Ronan sighed. “His fingerprints. There was no time to clean the thing off. The peelers don’t actually get prints off a gun very often, but it does happen occasionally. And if we reveal the location of the buried body with the bullets in it, ballistics will connect the killing to the gun. I simply cannot take that chance.”
“True enough.”
“I know, I know. And, by the way, nobody else in the family is aware of Tom’s involvement in that shooting. Not even Lorcan. He’s the one we usually think of as the hothead in the family. Well, that’s why I wanted to make sure he was kept out of all this.”
“Just as well.”
“So, Brennan, I have to retrieve that gun. Once I’ve done that, I will set the wheels in motion to inform the victim’s family of the location of their son’s unhallowed grave and give them that small . . . well, comfort is not the word. Partial resolution.”
“You said ‘retrieve,’ which suggests to me you know where this gun is.”
“I do now, but it’s not someplace where I can just waltz in and say, ‘Excuse me, lads, I’ll take that pistol if you don’t mind. It reflects badly on the family, you understand.’” Ronan could not quite pull off the effort to lighten the tone.
“When did you find this out?”
“Today. From Jonno. He told me but he didn’t tell Lorcan. From what Jonno said, I know this is reliable information.”
“I suppose I shouldn’t ask where the gun is.”
“You may indeed ask, Father Burke. It’s in the parochial house of Saint Matthew’s church in east Belfast.”
“What the fuck is it doing there?”
“Your astonishment is understandable, Father.”
“Do they keep a stockpile of weapons in case Saint Matthew’s gets attacked again?”
“No.”
Ronan drank his non-drink in silence for a few minutes, then elaborated, “It’s a Browning Hi-Power nine millimetre pistol, and it was placed with the parish priest there for safekeeping. Now the priest is dead.”
“Gun, dead priest. Is there by any chance a connection?�
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“No, actually. Father McCarthy was seventy-six years old. He died of natural causes.”
“And the gun was placed with him why?”
“You don’t want to know. And you’re better off not knowing.”
“So nobody can come at me with a rubber truncheon and beat the truth out of me.”
Ronan didn’t laugh. There was nothing fanciful about it. Not here.
“What has me even more rattled is that Tom wants to go in there and get the gun himself. I rang him and got him over to the house as soon as we got back from the Kesh. Now that he knows where the gun is, he’ll have nothing else on his mind till this gets resolved. If I could find any humour in this, I’d be plotting to dress myself up as a cowboy and go in there and hunt for that there gun.”
Ronan changed the subject and they spoke of other matters and listened to the music. Brennan, though, his tongue loosened a bit by drink, again brought up the elephant in the room. The gun in the parlour.
“Whereabouts in the church is it, do you know?”
“In the cellar. I don’t have anything more specific than that.”
“Could someone get into that cellar and out again? What’s it used for?”
“I’ve never seen it. Remember, we didn’t have Tom’s wedding party there, just the ceremony itself. And the wedding of course is another reason Tom can’t be showing his face there; somebody might remember seeing the young groom going in and out of the church.”
“So, Ronan, I guess walking up to the door of Saint Matthew’s, greeting the parish secretary or the priest and saying, ‘Say, have you got a pistol lying around and can I have it?’ is just not on.”
“You have shrewdly identified the problem, Brennan. I can’t go knocking at the door. Anything I do, and this goes double for anything I do in east Belfast, gets noticed. And getting noticed in relation to something like this would toll the death knell for my hopes to participate in the new power-sharing institutions. If in fact those institutions get established.”
