The Girl From the Killing Streets Read online

  Someone else.

  Like the peeler who had to die because of what he saw!

  She shivered again, remembering how the poor bastard lay on the pavement with a knife in his chest. It was Fitzpain’s serrated kitchen knife, the same weapon he used here to carve off the rapist’s dick. But her fingerprints were on the handle when the peeler died.

  She remembered how she had vomited in the gutter.

  It was one of the Pain Men who finished off the Proddy boy’s punishment. Finn McKenna - the one with the livid scar on his cheek - took Fitzpain’s knife and carved a cross on the boy’s chest. It was a tribal mark known to everyone who lived in this street. The Cross of Pain, they called it.

  Sorcha drew a deep breath, but it didn’t achieve much. The reality of her pointless life lived on. As for Brian Fitzpain; making people pay seemed to be what this miserable existence was all about. Retribution for other people’s crimes, real or imagined. Mostly imagined, but that was the nature of the man. His imagination was limited to other people’s faults and failings.

  He wasn’t one of the more senior Belfast Provos, more like a piggy-in-the-middle man, the sort who took orders from above and passed them on to the Provisional IRA foot soldiers out on the streets. A killer, nonetheless. A mindless killer who was out on those hate-filled streets last night when the peeler came along.

  Sorcha sighed in frustration. She should hate him, really hate him, but she knew the part he had played in her life and that made full-blown hatred so difficult. So she feared him instead.

  She focussed on his heavily lined face, keeping her gaze clear of the figure now motionless on the ground. Looking at the boy would remind her of the part she played in this latest killing. Fitzpain was the murderer, but she had been the lure who approached the boy and distracted him… ordered to do it by Fitzpain. And it was Fitzpain who ordered her to approach the peeler as he walked through the Ardoyne.

  God forgive her on both counts.

  “Can’t youse move the boy’s body somewhere else?” she asked. “Can’t youse dump him on a Proddy estate?”

  Fitzpain shook his head. “We’ll let the Prods know where to find him. They can come and fetch him and dump him on their own patch.”

  “What about the police?”

  “Jeez, girl! When was the last time youse saw any peelers down this alley?”

  “I saw a couple o’ British soldiers come down here last week.”

  “Bastards!”

  Sorcha shrugged and took a step back, anxious to get away from the stench.

  Fitzpain wiped the knife blade on his already-stained trousers. He looked like he didn’t really care if anyone saw the stains. Why should he? Everyone hereabouts would know what it was all about, and who did it. And anyone who grassed on Fitzpain would likely face a similar fate. Even the suspicion of treachery could be enough to get a man killed.

  Sorcha bit at her lower lip. “The Prods’ll want revenge, Brian.”

  He stabbed the point of his knife towards her. “No they won’t. They’ll know what he did and they’ll be glad we did the job for them. The wee girl was one of ours. T’was our job to make this bastard pay. The Prods’ll know that.”

  She wasn’t convinced. “They’ll want to kill one of ours in return. Youse know they will.”

  “Let ’em try!”

  “They will.”

  They damn well would try. Her conviction was just a matter of common sense and nothing to do with her sleeping with a Protestant this past month or more. Thank God the Pain Men knew nothing about Martin. He wasn’t a militant Prod, but that didn’t matter. Sleeping with the other side was dangerous enough in these parts. She hoped to God the Provos would never find out.

  Fitzpain’s voice mellowed slightly at that point. “Never youse mind what they bastards choose to do. Youse did a good job tonight, Sorcha. Yer daddy would’ve been proud of youse.”

  “Oh yeah?” What else could she say? The truth? The man he referred to wasn’t her daddy, not her real daddy. Brian Fitzpain, of all people, should have known that well enough. Patrick Mulveny was just a faded photograph hidden away at the back of a drawer. A ghost from a distant past. Someone not to be talked about in front of her mammy because he ran out on her before Sorcha was born.

  Before she was conceived.

  “Yeah. And here’s a word of warnin’.” Fitzpain edged closer to her. “Stay home the rest of the day. If youse know what’s good fer youse, don’t even cross yer front doorstep, except to make those phone calls.”

  “Why?”

  “Youse knows why. Just do as ye’re told.” He tried to say more but his words were drowned by the sudden outbreak of gunfire somewhere nearby.

  Sorcha listened. She had grown used to the differences in the noises made by the weapons. This time it was British army SLRs shooting it out against an IRA Sten gun. Nothing new there. A few people would end up dead. By morning friends and relatives would be comforting the widows. The Belfast Telegraph might run a paragraph or two, but it wouldn’t make a story in any of the national newspapers.

  A helicopter approached, the thubba-thubba sound disturbing the sleep of anyone who wasn’t already awake and wondering how long the gunfire would continue. Its searchlight illuminated an area a few streets away.

  The shooting continued.

  It was par for the course.

  ***

  September 1980

  A loud explosion somewhere near the prison brought our discussion to an end. The door rattled; the bomb was that close. Even the burly warder was momentarily put out. Was this what the waterlogged soldiers at the checkpoint had been on the lookout for? Yet another bomb? Sorcha lapsed into silence while the prison warder went to speak to someone out in the corridor. I tried to ignore the sudden tension and ran a finger over my notes. This was a good start to my research, but there was a lot more to be unearthed, more detail to be discovered behind the raw facts.

  I felt a tingle of excitement at the scale the girl’s willingness to open up to me but, as before, I deliberately asked no questions about the baby she had referred to. It was easy enough to guess. When I was a newspaper reporter here, I learned all about the horrors inflicted on unmarried pregnant girls in Ireland. The effects of the cruelty stayed with those girls throughout their lives. Maybe she would tell me about it later. I hoped so.

  The warder came back into the room and I resumed my questioning. “Sorcha, when you spoke about Fitzpain, you said you knew who he was. What did you mean by that?”

  “’Twas what I thought… what I suspected then… at that time. Not now.” She gritted her teeth as if suddenly angered by the thought. “I’d discovered the full truth of it by the end of that day and… and t’was more than I bargained for.”

  “What was the full truth?”

  She looked away and lowered her voice. “The truth… the real truth was… shite… me mammy was a whore.”

  “Meaning?”

  “That’s all I’m tellin’ youse fer now. Don’t ask fer anything more. Not yet.” She turned back to me abruptly, jutted her chin at me and her eyes radiated defiance.

  “None of this came out in court,” I said.

  She sighed, a deep heart-felt sigh. “Me lawyer knew all about it, but he thought it might turn the jury against me.”

  “Why?”

  “Never mind. It’s not important now.”

  “It could be very important, Sorcha, but we’ll talk more about it later.” Although I could see that she was getting tired, I had to ask her, “The things you have told me… you don’t mind if I put all this into the book?”

  She shrugged, a weary gesture. “I wouldn’t have told you if I wanted it kept a secret, would I?” She suddenly wiped a hand across her forehead and frowned. “I’m getting’ a headache, so I am. Can we stop now? I don’t want to talk any more. Not just now.”

  “You find it emotionally painful?” I had no wish to overstay my welcome. There was so much more I wanted to learn from her.

>   “Makes me want to cry, so it does,” she said. “But youse’ll come again? Youse will, won’t youse?”

  “Of course. We’ll have several more chats before we’re through.”

  From the start I had accepted the need for numerous interviews before I had a complete story. Some people think I can get all the information I need for a book from just one interview, but it doesn’t work like that. And it certainly wasn’t going to work like that with this book.

  When I came to leave the prison, a guard warned me that a building in the next street was ablaze. “Take a detour if you’re going back through the town,” he said. “There might be other bombs. It never stops, does it?”

  I wondered once again if the soldiers at the checkpoint were expecting this. Were they looking for a car carrying explosives in the boot? Did the bomber escape their attention? Did the vehicle get through the checkpoint because someone messed up in the torrential rain?

  I would probably never know.

  It was still raining heavily when I walked out into the dismal daylight, a cold rain that struggled to wipe away the lingering smell of smoke and cordite. An army truck raced past, closely followed by a Land Rover. A bomb disposal squad on its way to defuse yet another device. It was what still counted for normal here.

  I was caught in another queue as I drove along that moorland road that brought me here earlier. The blockage seemed to be in the same location, but this time there was much more activity around it. As I came closer, I saw that a bomb had exploded on the far side of the road and the traffic was being directed onto the nearside grass verge to avoid a burned-out Land Rover. I wound down my window when a soldier – an older man – tapped on the glass. He looked tired, war-weary.

  “Where are you going, sir?”

  “Belfast. Has anyone been killed here?”

  “Never mind that, sir. Be careful as you drive past. The grass is muddy.”

  “Is Private Atkins safe?”

  He jerked his head back and frowned. “You know him?”

  “He spoke to me when I drove past here earlier. I thought he was too young to be caught up in the Irish Troubles. Should have been in college back home.”

  The soldier shook his head sadly. “Too many of our lads are in the same boat.” He glanced across the road towards the wrecked vehicle. “Atkins was in the Land Rover when it was hit by a mortar bomb.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  “Drive carefully, sir.” He sniffed again as he walked away.

  I drove on to Belfast where the atmosphere was no better.

  People think Belfast is just one big city, but it isn’t. It’s two half-cities intermeshed and glued together against the wishes of the people who live there. It’s a Protestant, Loyalist half-city which claims to be British although it’s technically not a part of Great Britain. And it’s a Catholic, Nationalist half-city which would rather be a part of the Irish Republic, provided it could still take advantage of the financial benefits supplied by British taxpayers. I’d learned all this years ago when I married an Irish woman and moved from leafy Surrey to the grim reality of Belfast, trying to make a living as a journalist. Even today, it didn’t make any sense to me, and I doubt that it made much sense to the people of Northern Ireland. But, like I said, it was normality to them. There was no sense in it, but they knew nothing else.

  When my wife died, I buried her in Belfast because it was her home town. I moved back to England, but the contradictions of Northern Ireland went with me. The grief of losing Annie also went with me, but that’s another story. The grief came back to me that rainy day as I drove into Belfast and detoured to the cemetery to visit Annie’s final resting place. I was glad of the rain dripping down my cheeks, mingling with the tears when I placed a sodden bunch of flowers beside the tombstone. As I stood beside the grave, the cold Irish rain speared through my body as easily as hot pee through six inches of snow. I was chilled to the core and that made things seem worse than they really were.

  Late that day I flew back to Heathrow, took a taxi to my flat in Wimbledon and read through my notes over a heated up ready-meal. They represented a sound start to my investigation, but told me very little about the murders. If Sorcha really was guilty, why did I have those alarm bells ringing inside my head? And if she was innocent, why did she confess? Why did she feel so guilty? I was determined to find out.

  Chapter Three

  September 1980

  The trouble with the Irish Question is that no one really understands what the question is, so what’s the point of looking for an answer? That’s what my editor used to say when I worked as a reporter for the Belfast Telegraph. He taught me the value of cynicism and his teaching stayed with me. Little had changed since then, except that I was now a damn sight more cynical than I once was. But at least I was my own man. Age and experience had taught me to accept nothing at face value. Belfast was behind me, Fleet Street was behind me, but I still had the mind of a sceptical journalist.

  Another thing I had learned along the way was the importance of detailed research. In this case, it wasn’t just a matter of what actually happened on Bloody Friday, it was also a case of seeing into the minds of people who were there. I was curious about how the RUC conducted their enquiries into those two murders, overloaded as they were by the bombs. Common sense told me I needed to speak to a policeman who had been intimately involved. That was why I made contact with William Evans. I figured that, as a Welshman, he would have a degree of neutrality towards the Northern Irish problems, but I should have taken more care over the effect the Troubles had on his wife, a Belfast woman.

  My first meeting with Will was at his home in North Wales. I drove to Llandudno and met Will while his twin girls were at school and his wife was busy shopping. Framed photographs of the two attractive teenagers sat on every flat surface, a sure sign that they were well-loved by their parents. Will was at home because it was one of his off-duty days. He now worked daylight hours manning a duty desk at a rural police station not too far from the town. With the house to ourselves, I sat at the kitchen table and he made us both a mug of coffee. I remembered how drained he had looked when I met him at Sorcha’s trial. He seemed more at ease now. You had to look hard to see the residual effects of the damage to his face; lips that drooped marginally too low on one side, and an eye that seemed to be tugged away from its correct focus. The signs were faint, but they would probably go with him to his grave.

  He took a whiskey bottle from a cupboard and opened it. “Something to put hairs on your chest?” He aimed the bottle at my coffee.

  I put my hand over the mug. “Never touch the stuff, Will.”

  “Teetotal?”

  “Far from it, but I’ve seen too many lives ruined by whiskey. It’s dangerous stuff.”

  “In that case, don’t mind me.” He gave me a disbelieving look and added a large helping to his own mug. “I needed it when I was with the RUC. We all did. There wasn’t a single desk drawer at the North Castle Street barracks that didn’t have at least one bottle hidden away. The bosses knew all about it, and they knew it was what kept us going when the bombing and rioting started.”

  “But that’s all behind you now. Isn’t it? Now that you have a normal desk job here in a country at peace.”

  “Depends on what you mean by ‘behind you’. It’ll never be fully erased from my mind. Never. I still wake up with nightmares, so do our girls. Milly seems to be the only one coping with the aftermath.”

  “Your wife is Irish. Is that what helps her?”

  “Why should it? Too many Northern Irish people have gone to the dogs because of the Troubles. Too many families torn apart. No, Milly copes these days because she’s basically a strong person. She’s managed to put the worst of the strain behind her. Nowadays I depend on her.” He took a long gulp of whiskey-infused coffee. “Can you believe it? I was the cop who saw it all first hand and yet I now depend on my wife to keep me sane.”

  I gave him an inquisitive look.
“Are you up to telling me more about what happened on Bloody Friday?”

  “What can I tell you that you haven’t already heard?”

  “The human side, Will. Especially the human story behind those murders. I know what was said before Sorcha Mulveny’s trial collapsed, but I want to hear and write about the bits that didn’t come out in court. As far as the bombing campaign is concerned, I want my readers to know more than just the number of explosions and how many were killed. I want them to understand how it affected people like you. I want to write about the hell you went through.”

  “You mean… why I still have nightmares?”

  “Whatever you can tell me. Lead me through the day, a step at a time. Why don’t you start with when you woke up that morning? Was it the beginning of what looked like just another normal day in Belfast?”

  “Like hell it was!”

  ***

  Friday 21st July 1972

  0545 BST

  Detective Sergeant Will Evans had been dreaming. It was a warm, comforting dream filled with memories of the North Wales coast where he grew up. The images floated gently through his head, as if he was watching them while drifting on a calm sea. He saw dreamy depictions of majestic hills, a balmy shore and the stark outlines of ruined castles. And then he found himself amongst the friendly people he had known in his youth.

  But it was only a dream.

  He was woken abruptly when a bomb exploded. It was his second rude awakening that night. The shock wave hit the house and the windows rattled, but the glass stayed intact. He instantly registered the tonal sound of the detonation. It was a car bomb and it wasn’t too far away.

  He felt Milly shift in the bed beside him, as if she was trying to hold onto the last vestiges of sleep, and failing. He was about to speak, to reassure her, when a grey mist passed over his eyes and a painful throb struck his forehead.