by Anne Emery
Brennan
When Tom and Brennan met up at Ronan’s the day after their excursion to east Belfast, Tom reported that Ronan was still at his office at Burke Transport, northern division. Gráinne was nowhere to be seen. So Tom was able to give Brennan a rundown on the cellar of Saint Matthew’s parochial house. “There’s an alarm on the door to the building, as you’d have seen for yourself, but once you’re inside, the door to the cellar isn’t locked. It’s just a regular door off the corridor. I walked in after you and went down the stairs. Doesn’t look as if there’s anything important down there. Statues, metal cabinets, no Vatican gold.”
“Well, the alarm will be off when the parish secretary gets in. She must be the first one there. She told me she got there at half six in the morning. There’s a seven o’clock Mass, so the workday starts early.”
“Is maith sin.” That’s good. “The sun doesn’t come up till around half seven. Once she goes in, I go in. I search the cellar, find the fucking gun, and get out of there. I’ll leave a gap of a few days so she won’t connect me with you if, God forbid, she spots me there.”
With that, Tom left for home, and Brennan tried to put the gun scheme out of his mind. Nor did he care to dwell on the fact that he had conspired with Tom to do something Ronan emphatically did not want his son to do, and that he was keeping Ronan in the dark about the plan.
* * *
But one unpromising scheme led him to brood on another. Brennan was haunted by the fact that he had not been able to help his cousin make a case against one of the many perpetrators of the 1974 atrocities. Harold Tait in the United States had given Brennan some details of the evangelical rally in Tennessee, and Brody MacAllan had confirmed, however unintentionally, that there had been a downpour on one of the days and that a man had shouted out his concerns about papists outbreeding the Protestant population of America. Hiram Stockwell had put the man down gently with a reference to America being the home of people of all faiths. Something like that. As Tait said, neither of these incidents would have made the news, so MacAllan would not have read about them. There may have been news photos of the attendees, drenched to the skin, but the local Tennessee papers would hardly be available in the Belfast library, for MacAllan to see or for Brennan to research. So Brennan had been convinced that MacAllan had been in Tennessee as he claimed. Yet Ronan’s witness was absolutely certain that he saw MacAllan in one of the bomb cars. Brennan tried to work through all this in his mind. What else had Tait told him about the rally? There was merchandise on sale. MacAllan had told Duane and Ruby that his wife had stopped to buy eight-track tapes and something else when he was trying to get her away and off to the airport. A poster was the other purchase, something large and inconvenient to carry because it was enclosed in glass and a frame. And his wife still had the poster on her wall, wherever she was living now. Evidence right there of her husband’s alibi. Was it possible, Brennan wondered, that she had sent away to Tennessee and ordered these things? Brennan chastised himself for persisting with this in the face of MacAllan’s accurate accounting of the Stockwell event. But, with nothing else to go on, he decided to give the Reverend Tait a call again.
“Can you bear to hear my voice again, Harold?”
“Any time, Brennan.”
“You told me about audiotapes and things being sold at the Stockwell rally in 1974.”
“Oh, yes.”
“Would someone have been able to send away and order these, have them delivered?”
“I don’t think so, Brennan. Nowadays, yes, there’s a bit of a mail order business, but not back then. You had to grab what you could while you were there.” Tait laughed then and said, “And people did, once they noticed the Scottish poster. It became something of a collector’s item.”
“Scottish poster? What was that?”
“There was a misprint on the posters of Hiram Stockwell. Superimposed over the image of Stockwell himself, at the bottom of the poster, was a verse from Psalms. ‘Be still and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.’”
It was Brennan’s turn to laugh. “They weren’t claiming the Scots were heathens, surely not!”
“No, but the typo was in the word ‘heathen.’ There was an R instead of an N, so it read ‘exalted among the heather.’ People had some fun proclaiming that the Lord’s new promised land was Scotland.”
“Wonderful. I should get one for my friends in Nova Scotia where I’m based now. New Scotland. Maybe I could make copies and sell them as a fundraiser for my parish.”
“Your heart’s in the right place, Brennan, but they’re no longer available. Stockwell was good-natured about it, made a couple of little quips, but he took them off the market that day and brought out a corrected version a week or two later. Exalted were they who managed to grab a little collector’s item before they were removed from the kiosk.”
“Removed them while the rally was still going on.”
“Oh, yes, it was a bit of fun but one wouldn’t want to prolong any mockery of sacred scripture! Anybody arriving for the last two days of the rally was out of luck. The heather posters — they were in fact the only posters — were gone.”
Brennan let this sink in for a moment. “And the dates of the rally were?” Brennan knew but he wanted to hear it again from the minister who had been there. The witness.
“May the thirteenth to the seventeenth.”
Brennan felt a surge of hope. “So the last day for the posters was what, the fifteenth?”
“You got it. They weren’t available the last two days.”
* * *
Ronan came in an hour or so later with Gráinne and Lorcan. Lorcan was carrying an acoustic guitar. “So you’re a musician, Lorcan.”
“Yeah. Me and Carrick have a regular gig at McCribbon’s bar.”
“What music do you do?”
“Traditional music, Republican songs, that kind of thing.”
“You must enjoy that.”
“I do, though it means I never get away from the ‘office.’”
“Office?”
“I work as a barman at McCribbon’s, usually in the day, sometimes at night. But it’s all right. It’s a good place.”
“They’re good, the pair of them,” said Ronan. “Lots of music in our family.” He gave a nod to Brennan, the choirmaster. “Our boy had a harder sound with his previous band. Tell him what you called yourselves, Lorcan.”
“We were the Gobscheiss Militia.”
“That’s brilliant!” Brennan appreciated the Germanic twist on the familiar Irish term of abuse, gobshite. “What happened to the Gobscheiss Militia?”
“Our drummer and bass player are out of circulation right now.”
“Ah.”
“I’m about to wet the tea,” said Gráinne. “Who’d like some?” They all would and, when it was ready, they all sat in the front room with their cups and saucers.
“I have some news,” Brennan announced.
All three of them looked wary. News was something to be leery of, even during a ceasefire.
“Brody MacAllan was in Tennessee at the evangelical rally in May of 1974.”
“Yeah, we know,” Lorcan replied.
“And he has papers showing that he left Belfast for America on May the eleventh and had a return flight on the eighteenth, landing here the morning of the nineteenth.”
They all knew that as well.
“But I just received evidence — or what will be submitted as evidence — that in fact he left the United States on May the fifteenth. He flew out that evening and would have landed here the next morning. So he would have been back here in time to commit the bombings on the seventeenth.”
“No!” Gráinne exclaimed. Ronan and his son merely stared at Brennan.
“The minister I know in the States told me there was a poster on sale at the
rally, but it had a typo in it, a misprint that was memorable because it was comical. When the mistake was discovered, the posters were removed from sale. The last day anyone could have bought one was the fifteenth of May. MacAllan obviously knew nothing about the posters being withdrawn; he slipped up when he told us his wife bought one of the posters and almost made them late for their flight out that same day.”
“I knew it!” Ronan raised two fists in triumph. “He was in the thick of things with the bombings, and he had papers forged to back him up. I believe the word ‘collusion’ has come up in our conversations from time to time.”
“Yeah, he clearly had help from official sources.”
Lorcan looked at Brennan sharply. “Did you just say you met MacAllan?”
“I get around.”
“You’re getting to know your way around this wee town. Were you over to his place for tea?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Brennan answered, “but it wasn’t tea. It was the Iron Will.”
Ronan said, “We heard that he’s been spending his weekends there since he returned from Scotland. Brennan went in there, undercover, and confirmed it.”
“Brilliant. Now, this bar. It’s off the Newtownards Road, right?”
“Don’t even think about going in there, Lorcan.”
“So what are we supposed to do, Da? Let him slide into a comfortable old age?”
Brennan ignored this and said, “What happens now?”
Ronan and his son exchanged a look, and Ronan said, “We go to the peelers.”
“Where our people have had so much success in the past.”
“Lorcan, remember our objective here. We don’t want to put a bullet in this fucker’s brain and have the whole thing written off as ‘another killing by the IRA.’ We want MacAllan publicly identified and prosecuted as one of the Monaghan and Dublin bombers. We want this to focus the minds of the police and the public on the fact that all the bastards who planned and carried out the attacks were able to get away with it. Till now.”
“I wouldn’t be putting my faith in the Royal Ulster Constabulary if I were you, Da. But then, you’ve known them longer than I have. Which should make you even more cynical about the bastards.”
“This operation is to put the police in the spotlight as much as MacAllan. Shame them into doing their jobs and arresting MacAllan and sending him south for prosecution. We go to the RUC and the Garda Síochána with the evidence. His name and photo, the witness who saw him in the car the day of the bombings, and this poster and a sworn statement from the American minister. We bring forward the flight and re-entry documents we now know were forged, and anything else we can come up with. And what’s he likely to do in response? Grass on the rest of them who were in on it.”
“But we have to tread carefully,” Brennan warned. “You’ll want a lawyer’s advice before you decide how much of this to disclose to the police. Presumably you reveal just enough to get him charged, keeping the rest in reserve. You want him wedded to his story of leaving on the eighteenth. Bring your evidence out when it will do the most good. If it’s handled right, you may be able to set in motion the first prosecution in the bombings of Dublin and Monaghan.”
Ronan smiled, put his hands together in prayer, and looked to the skies. “Thank you, great God of mercy and truth!”
“I want to see that fucker.” Lorcan was already seeing that fucker in his mind’s eye, viewing him through the scope of a rifle.
“No, you don’t, Lorcan,” his father insisted. “And you don’t want him seeing you or any of the other lads. It’s going to take some careful manoeuvring to make this happen after all these years. We can’t let anything tip him off. We can’t do anything to blow this one chance to get justice for the families.”
Chapter XVI
Monty
Monty was making progress in his Canadian Earth Equipment case, having found a number of documents that showed defects in the metals that were supplied to the company over the course of several years. This meant Monty’s client was on firm ground in claiming that the fault lay not with Canadian Earth but with the metal supplier. He called his Halifax law firm and was commended for his fine work. But his contentment was short-lived. Minutes after that call, he received some disheartening news from Katie Flanagan. The bank had finally foreclosed on the family home, and Katie, her mother, and the other children had to leave. The Northern Ireland Housing Executive had found them a flat in another part of the city, far from everything and everyone they knew in Musgrave Park. Winnie Flanagan said she couldn’t bear to prolong the agony. The new flat was ready, and she was going to make the move right away. Monty had immediately offered his assistance.
Monty dreaded seeing the family leave their home. And it was going to be even worse, because moving day was a Saturday and Normie was with him. She had insisted on helping with the move. Rather than pay a moving company, he had rented a cargo van and conscripted Brennan Burke to help with the heavy lifting. Brennan arrived, still in his clerical suit and collar from some priestly activities earlier in the afternoon, and the moving party was set to go. Normie climbed into the van beside Monty, Brennan got in on the other side of her, and they headed out. When they pulled up in front of the house, it was like an old-fashioned photograph of children about to be taken to an orphanage. Or a family being evicted from their home, which it was. Katie and her sister and brothers were in front of the house, each of them with a prized possession in hand. Katie was juggling a pile of books and a chipped red Pyrex mixing bowl. Clare clung to an enormous stuffed lamb with drooping ears. Dermot had a tin whistle in one hand and a train engine in the other. Darren had a hurley. Everyone was there but young Timmy. Several mothers were out in the street, arms around their children, looking on.
Monty quickly introduced Brennan to them, and they all said, “Hello, Father.” Aside from that, no time was wasted on pleasantries. Monty and Brennan were obviously thinking the same way: get the children’s minds off it by throwing themselves into the heavy work immediately. They went into the house and cased the place, deciding what should go out in what order, and they got to it. Mrs. Flanagan was inside, a worn-looking leather suitcase in her left hand, the right hand held out in front of her as if she could ward off whatever awaited her outside her home. She was thin and blond; she looked faded, wan. It took her a couple of seconds to register their presence and decide who was who. “Oh! You must be Mr. Collins.”
“That’s me. Monty,” he said and put out his hand. She took it and held it as if she had no idea what to do with it.
“This is Father Burke,” he said. “Mrs. Flanagan.”
“How do you do, Father? I’m Winnifred, but you can call me Winnie.”
“And I’m Brennan.”
“Thank you very much for helping us today, and for all your legal help, Monty.”
“You’re more than welcome, Winnie.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, “that I’ve been so, so useless through all this. I’ve let the children down. My own children! It’s just that I haven’t been able to . . . Eamon dying like that. Someone smashing into him and knocking him off the bridge, and not staying to help him. That’s the part of it I can’t get past: someone did this to him, and that person is still out there, living his life, and hasn’t been charged. It’s not the money.” She laughed at herself then. “Everybody says that, I know. It’s not only the money. We’re in need of it, no denying. But I want to see someone brought to law for what he did to my Eamon!”
“I understand, Winnie. I know. And I’ll do my very best for you.”
“I know you will, Monty.”
His “very best” hadn’t done much good for her and the family today. Most likely it never would. But he kept that to himself.
He did, however, have a question about money. “Winnie, Katie told me that for a while there you were getting sums of money from somewhere. Deposits into your
account. And then —”
“And then it stopped. The money stopped coming.”
“What was the source of those payments?”
“Monty, we never knew.”
“How did the payments get into your account? What did the people at the bank tell you?”
A pink flush spread over her face, and she looked away from him. “I made a hames of it when I asked them. They told me a cheque had arrived, I think they said by post, from a company called Day Sure Investments. And I . . . I didn’t want them to take it back or something, so I said, ‘Oh, yes, Eamon told me something about investments he had.’ And I didn’t ask any more questions.”
Monty nodded, as if this was all quite in order. Then he asked, “What amounts are we talking about?”
“Sometimes it was eight hundred pounds, sometimes a bit less. Once a month.”
“I see. When did the payments stop?”
“Well, they started about three months or so after Eamon’s death and stopped before the first anniversary. I think it was seven months of payments in all.”
“All right. Thank you, Winnie. Let’s get back to work here.”
They lugged the boxes and pieces of furniture out and loaded them into the van. Monty pointed to the books and bowl in Katie’s arms and said, “We can just put all the things in a box, Katie. Nothing will get lost.”
“I suppose so. You’re right.” She handed over the books. “I’ll keep this. It might get broken if it’s a rough trip.”
“All right.” He turned to the younger children and offered to pack the lamb and other treasured items. The kids looked at him with big, sad eyes and shook their heads. He got it then. It wasn’t fear of having things lost or broken. It was fear of the unknown, the desolation of leaving their home. The beloved toys and other objects would comfort them on the journey none of them wanted to make.
