A car, stolen by Protestant para-military sympathisers, would later be found, burned through, at a picnic site on Lough Neagh, and later still a statement would be issued in the name of the
U.V.F. claiming that the dead man had been a known Republican activist.
Dead in the cab of his milk cart was the man who believed that he had no living enemy.
The widow of Pius Blaney stumbled, dazed, around her kitchen to make tea for the priest. She urged him to let it be k nown that she wished for no retaliation, that Pius, the softest-hearted man you could find in all Ireland, he would have wished for no retaliation.
The corpse in the mortuary not yet cold, a post mortem examination of gouged bullet tracks not yet completed
The O.C. met Mossie Nugent.
The urgency spilling in him, the eyes gleaming. 'I want a target.'
Mossie stalling. 'Would you not do better to wait for Jon Jo, not go rushing?'
'I want a target and quick.'
'I'll think on it.'
'You'll do more…'
'It takes setting up…'
They sat in the O.C.'s car. The O.C. had interrupted him on his way to work. The fingers below the plaster on his wrist were swollen sore, resting on the wheel.
'You got a problem, Mossie?'
'I got no problem.'
'Why the bloody cold water, why the bloody ice'
'I was just saying…'
'Why d'you kill what I want, Mossie?'
The eyes searched him. Same eyes, same strip search, as in the barn.
' There's no call for you's and me to quarrel, Mossie… We wait a few days and the mountain will say the Organisation is soft. You let those Prod feckers kill Pius Blaney on the mountain without an immediate response we can pack the whole war in. I don't need a Jon Jo back to tell me that. Give me a target, Mossie, and quick.'
Mossie said, 'There's a U.D.R. bastard, drives the bus from Stewartstown. He carries a gun, but he'd never reach it…' 'Too small.
For Pius Blaney, people'd want something better.' 'There's a place where they've put patrols down from a Puma. The helicopter's used the same pad two limes in the last month. Could stake it…'
'Needs six men, needs a heavy-calibre, you could be waiting for ever. I want now.'
'There's a Catholic in the Special Branch in Dungannon. He's Browne…' 'Do us great.'
He gave an address. He listed two sets of car registration plates.
Detective Sergeant Joseph Browne. He gave the name and the address and the make of the car. 'How'd you do it?' 'What's it to you, Mossie?'
The eyes cut him. Mossie was getting out of the car. 'Just asking
… just talking.' Mossie gave his O.C. the full smirk. 'And I wouldn't be wanting to see another disaster like there was with that wee woman.'
He was the master of the Task Co-ordinating Group meeting. They had no alternative, Hobbes was in the chair. The major and the Assistant Chief Constable and the colonel and Rennie of the Branch and the Assistant Under-Secretary, they could only listen.
'… This is a Five operation which we will direct. When we require help we will request it. Any shortfall in co- operation will be reported immediately to London and then to the Prime Minister's office. We believe that Jon Jo Donnelly has already left mainland Britain. In our view, he will return quite shortly to his home territory, to Altmore mountain. From midnight an area with a radius of five miles from his home there will be declared Tactical Out of Bounds. There will be no military or police movement inside the area without my express permission. Overall direction of the operation against Donnelly will be handled from Curzon Street. I will have my people on the mountain and they will have discreet support. They will wait for Donnelly, and when the time comes a hit force will be moved in. This is the way it will In Questions…?'
Bren, sitting behind Hobbes, watched the face. And mid stares, and no questions. Not finished, not quite, binding the last blood.
'… In London, they want Jon Jo Donnelly's head and I aim to give it them.'
He shuffled his papers together. Bren saw the smirk on his face.
And he saw the dry smile of the major who would provide the back-up, and the dented pride of the Assistant Chief Constable, and the suppressed fury of the colonel, and the flustration of the Assistant Under-Secretary who already knew that his master had been overruled. Rennie sucked at his pipe, he shut the briefcase, and leaned towards Hobbes, out of earshot ol the others
'You're an arsehole, Hobbes, and sending her back onto Altmore makes you simply a bigger arschole
He had been on the upper deck all through the night. He felt that the sea air had purged the memories, the fear of mainland Britain.
He had used one of the British passports to go through the port immigration. He left the ferry boat behind him, whre it dwarfed the fishing fleet that was clustered under the shelter of the harbour wall. Donnelly took the bus from Santander to the airport at Bilbao. He felt freedom within his grasp, and his Attracta and his Kevin, and he felt the joy grow in him that a man has in the going home from work hard done.
They stood by the cars.
Hobbes said, 'Just get over to her, and the both of you start moving.'
'She told me to pick her up this morning, I think she should be allowed to rest…'
When she needs a nanny then I'm sure she'll ask for one. In the meantime look at yourself, get a bit of drive into your system.'
Hobbes walked away from him. Bren went to his own car. The radio came on as he switched the ignition. A milk delivery driver, Catholic, shot dead by gunmen, Protestants… Christ, what a bloody awful war to be a part of… All the funerals going through his mind that were daily catalogued on the local television. A dog handler, and his Alsatian trotting behind the hearse with the police coat on its spine. A soldier, the union flag and his beret on the coffin carried by the bearer party from his platoon. The little escort behind Patsy Riordan's family, furtive as if they hoped their presence didn't give offence to those who had taken his life. A taxi driver in Belfast, his cortege made up of the cabs of his fellow Protestant workers. An English scaffolding erector, murdered for working at the new police station in Strabane, and his wife on sedation and eight months pregnant and supported by family who wouldn't have known where Strabane was… The war he was a part of.
Some had been warned that they were targets, most knew only generally that they were at risk.
The detective sergeant sat with the other plain-clothes police. He was opposite the Press seats, close to the witness box, side on to the dock, half facing the Lord Chief Justice, and he was already nodding.
Crumlin Road, No. 1 Court, always had the central heating turned up as if the Lord Chief Justice had been imported from the Caribbean, not Carrickfergus. He was there to see Brady go down, and preferably for a tenner. Some of those that he saw, between the moments that his head dropped, would have been warned of specific danger, more would just have accepted the general risk to their lives. Judges were shot by the P.I.R.A., defence lawyers were shot by the Protestants, the prison officers guarding the dock were detested equally… He was the man who had turned his back on his history, his family. He worked for Protestants. His wife of three years, Catholic upbringing, lived wiih their eight-month-old baby amongst Protestant neighbours.
Detective Sergeant Browne wore his pistol under his coat. Policemen were allowed to carry their guns into court.
He dozed because he had not slept, the baby's teeth, and close lto him was the exhibits bench for the case against Brady, and laid on the bench were a Kalashnikov rifle, and a Remington rifle, and a Luger pistol, and their ammunition, all wrapped in plastic bags, killing weapons.
He had heard on his car radio of the murder of Pius Blaney, the milk-cart driver. There would be reprisal, Detective Sergeant Browne knew it. It was inevitable.
He drove via the Department of the Environment office. The message was on the answer phone. He transcribed it and then rang Cathy. He spoke to her recording machine which didn't answer him back, heard him out.
