Mermaid in a Bowl of Tears (Exit Unicorns Series) (105 page)

“A damp arse is the least of our worries at present,” David said, tone still annoyingly calm.

“Ye don’t say,” Pat responded with no little sarcasm. “Ye’ll forgive me if I note that ye don’t seem over concerned about anything at present.”

“Patrick,” David replied wearily, “I’ve just shot four men, driven like a maniac for an hour and been certain about three times that I was a dead man. I need a minute or two to sort it all out before I have the appropriate hysterics.”

“An’ ye call Irishmen crazy,” Pat said. They both laughed and the charged atmosphere began to dissipate. “I can’t believe the security forces didn’t descend on us,” Pat said, watching David’s face for any change of expression that would give him a clue to the things that were puzzling him about the aftermath of their shootout.

David merely shrugged, eyes still closed, hands now crossed over his stomach.

“I thought the cars were equipped with panic buttons,” he persisted.

David opened his eyes and gave Pat an odd look. “Most are. Mine isn’t. It’d be frowned upon if I was to call in the cavalry, so they make certain there’s no temptation to do so.”

“What do you mean
frowned upon
?” Pat asked, with a queasy feeling that he knew exactly what David meant.

“I don’t exist for all intents and purposes here in Northern Ireland. If you were to go looking for me, my superiors would deny any knowledge of me. Nine times out of ten if you passed me in the street, you wouldn’t recognize me.”

“Seriously? Then how—why—in the jail I thought ye were regular army, or SAS.”

David shook his head, plucking a piece of grass from the verge and rolling it back and forth between his fingers. “No.”

“Is that all the explanation I’m to expect?”

“It’s all that’s safe for you to know,” David replied.

“Who the hell are ye? James Bond?”

David smiled grimly. “That’s about as close as you’ll come. I’d have a hard time explaining it myself, what I’m doing here. And in the end, it’s just best if you don’t know.”

“That leaves me a wee bit puzzled as to why ye took such an interest in myself, to begin with at least,” Pat finished awkwardly.

“I wasn’t there in any official capacity. They seemed to find you of particular interest, due more to your family history than anything. I can pull rank when I need to, so I offered to conduct the interrogation.”

“Too bad you didn’t offer a few days earlier,” Pat said.

“Yes, I apologize for that.”

Pat laughed. “Ye sound very prim an’ British at times, ye know.”

David smiled. “I suppose because I am very prim and British when it comes right down to it.”

“Ye still haven’t answered my question.”

David sat up, sun lighting his hair gold. He took a deep breath and looked Pat in the eye.

“Because my career, for lack of a better term, makes friendship, or any sort of relationship really, pretty much impossible. When I saw you in the jail, when I fed you that day, I recognized something in you. I guess I just liked you. It was that simple. And,” he looked down at the green stains on his palms, “I was lonely.”

“Oh,” Pat said quietly.

“Does that bother you?”

“What?”

“That I looked at you and saw something in your face that told me we were destined to be friends? That I was reckless enough not to consider my position or yours, that I didn’t see an Irishman when I looked at you, but just a human being?”

“No.”

“Really?” David asked, sounding rather surprised. A soft flush lit his fair skin, and he bent his head, suddenly absorbed in a leaf he’d plucked off his pant leg.

“It’s ironic,” Pat said, voice strangely soft.

“What is?” David asked, putting the pale green leaf to his eye.

“Yer supposed to be my sworn enemy, but somehow, without my willin’ it, ye’ve become my friend. An’ that’s the real answer to the question of why I trust ye.”

“War makes strange bedfellows at the best of times, and as this is the strangest little war in a strange little country, I don’t think our friendship is surprising at all.” David reached across and put something in Pat’s hand. “Here take this.”

Pat looked down to find a book of matches. “What’s this for?”

David grinned. “I just thought, being that it’s the property of the British Army and all, that you might like to be the one to set the car on fire.”

Part Seven
The End of Ordinary Life

THE FIRST OF THE BOMBS WENT OFF at precisely ten after two in the afternoon. The last at three o’ five. In between there were twenty-five others. It was a short timetable for terror, and yet extremely effective.

It wasn’t the first time Pamela had been called in to photograph the aftermath of a bomb. But she had never seen the sort of devastation that surrounded her now.

She picked her way carefully along, noting bits of cloth, and a pair of eyeglasses that had somehow miraculously survived the explosion, and lay whole and glimmering on top of a chunk of brick. There were other things amongst the rubble that she was afraid to look at directly, though she knew she would have to in a matter of minutes.

The Oxford Street bus station had only been one of the twenty-seven separate explosions that had rocked Belfast to its core only an hour before. The explosions had taken people unawares, and many had run for safety only to find themselves in worse peril. Both men and women were crying openly in the streets, as plumes of smoke still rose around them on the air of a summer afternoon. Most bombs had been set off in cars left parked at the various locations.

The office block adjacent to the bus station was destroyed, the front wall having been blown clear off. Beams, black and smoking, hung in midair or lay shattered on the ground. The station had been crowded when the bomb exploded. Now, other than police, firemen and corpses, it was quiet and deserted.

The dull thuds had sounded at first like firecrackers, but as the ones closer in to the core of the city had detonated there had been a terrible intensity in the air, followed by a great vacuum that inhabited the very molecules of the atmosphere, as though time had been rent apart at its seams and destroyed.

She walked along further, catching a flash of permed blonde hair poking out between a sheet of plaster and a great long shard of glass. She gritted her teeth and kept moving, keeping out an eye for Sergeant Wilbee or Constable Fred.

shovelling the remains of what had, only short hours ago, been a human being. The sight stopped her cold at the top of a mound of debris. Before she could stop herself she was sliding down it, and saw to her horror an arm completely detached from its owner, lying at the bottom of the mound, still clothed in a pale blue sleeve. She scrabbled back wildly, thinking if the arm touched her she might well go mad here in the midst of all this destruction.

A hand, large and strong, caught her from behind and pulled her up sharply. She turned and found a policeman, uniform coated in a fine dust, eyes red rimmed with grief, smoke and fatigue, facing her.

“Are ye alright?” he asked gruffly.

“I—I’ll do,” she managed weakly, swallowing hard on the acid that flooded her mouth.

“Here, lass.” It was Constable Fred coming up behind the man, his florid face kind, though filthy. He took out a handkerchief and handed it to her. “Yer taken a bit badly, that’s all, it’s to be expected.”

The other man nodded curtly and continued on his way through the massacre, shoulders squared against the horrors still to come.

“I feel a right fool,” she said, taking the handkerchief and mopping her face. It smelled comfortingly of limewater, and she took a grateful breath of its starchy folds before handing it back to Constable Fred.

“It’s alright lass; I’d worry if it didn’t bother you in this way. Ye need to get something in ye for the shock.”

Her stomach rebelled at the mere thought of food or drink and she shook her head vehemently.

“Right then, we’ll save tea for later. Is there someone you’d like me to call? I can walk you out beyond the barricades but then I’ll have to come back. I don’t feel right leaving you to yourself, though.”

She fought to get a grip on her emotions. Like the good Constable, she had a job to do and she fully intended to do it. “No, I—I just need a minute, then I’ll be fine.”

He gave her a dubious look, then nodded at the resolve he saw in her face. “Aye, well wait ‘til yer steady on yer pins, lass.”

“I will.”

“Alright, when yer ready to go, follow Gerard around. He’ll be the short one in the red jacket.”

She followed the direction of his finger and saw a man she recognized from his occasional appearance at the Tennant Street Station. She took a short breath and rose to her feet. Still shaky, but given another minute her feet just might agree to carry her around the edges of the huge crater that had once been Oxford Street.

Gerard nodded curtly at her. He was a short man, with a lean, wiry frame and a reputation for being one of the toughest and most thorough men on the job.

“Here,” he tossed her a blue glass jar. “Smear some under your nose, then you’ll not smell the blood or tissue. Makes it easier for both of us to do our job.”

“We’ll start here,” he pointed to the shell of a ribcage, now open, the entire thoracic spine visible, vertebrae strung together by the yellowy pads of cartilage. Above was air—the head and shoulders blown elsewhere. The legs were untouched, stuck out stiff as a scarecrow and capped with well-polished brown shoes. Her gaze was riveted to those shoes, for suddenly she saw him, whoever he had been, shining his shoes, freshly shaved, anticipating the evening ahead. The girl he might meet, an entire future there in a moment’s glance—now gone. A son, a brother, a lover, a carcass, chunks of evidence. The children who would not exist because their future father had been killed by a bunch of hard men who thought blowing up a bus station made some sort of political statement.

“You coming or not?”

Pamela took a deep breath, the menthol stinging her eyes. She put her camera to her eye and began shooting.

The next five hours were a blur of following the red jacket, of taking photos of a catalogue of atrocities her mind could barely take in. A blur of images underlined with the scent of vaporub. Finally Gerard stopped making notes into the tape recorder and nodded wearily to her.

“Come on, we both need a rest. Let’s sit.”

She followed him over to the open back end of a police tender, which had been used to cart supplies over. Later tonight when the scene was finally cleared, it would be reloaded with many of the same supplies, only now they would reek of blood and carnage and the smell of burned human flesh.

She closed her eyes and rubbed them hard. They were burning from the oily smoke and she felt as though the images she’d seen were seared permanently onto her retinas.

Gerard held out a mug of tea one of the constables had passed him.

She shook her head, and he shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

For the first time, she noted his accent didn’t carry the broad tones of Ulster, but rather a curious combination of clipped English consonants and New York street talk.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Born in Ballymena, moved to London when I was five, then to New York when I was ten. Came back here a few years ago. And you?”

“New York, summers here in Clare, Belfast, Boston and now Belfast again.”

“Can’t see what the attraction to this place might be, unless you’d family here.”

“I married a native,” she said.

“Ah, love then.”

“Yes, love.”

He took a long slug of tea. “Hard to believe such a thing exists on days like today.”

There was little doubt in her mind that this was the work of the IRA; that men like Joe, and, God help them all, Robin, had likely planned this for months, blinded by their hard-line view that violence was the only means to move toward their goals in the quagmire that was Ulster.

What sort of mind saw this as a means toward anything other than more hatred, more violence, and more pain for a population who no longer knew what it meant to live without these things?

He sighed. “We’d best get back at it, we don’t have a lot of light left.” He shook his head, “Fucking IRA.”

“You think it was them?” she asked, face hidden as she deftly changed her film for the tenth time that day.

“Doesn’t matter which set of psychopaths did it, these people are dead all the same. And undoubtedly you and I will be at a similar scene when the other side takes revenge.”

He stood and she followed suit, taking a deep breath to calm her nerves before facing the carnage again. Around them the activity was beginning to die down a bit, and the light was indeed starting its slow fade into a summer night. A lone fireman was wending his way amongst the rubble of bricks, mortar and glass that lay in great swathes along the street.

Gerard shook his head. “God have mercy on Belfast.”

The death toll would mount as the day came to its close and in all nine people would lose their lives, while one hundred and thirty were injured. Only two of the dead were soldiers, the rest were civilians. The youngest of these a fourteen-year-old boy. The vast majority of the injured were women and children.