Field of blood, p.1
Field of Blood, page 1
Gerald Seymour
FIELD OF
BLOOD
W • W • Norton & Company
New York London
Copyright © 1985 by Gerald Seymour All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
The author gratefully acknowledges help from many sources in the researching of this novel. For all that it depicts some of the recognisable horrors of life in Belfast, every character in Field of Blood is purely fictional.
First American Edition, 1985.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Seymour, Gerald.
Field of Blood.
I. Title.
PR6069.E734F5 1985 823’.914 85-4821
ISBN 0-393-02214-5
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110
W. W. Norton & Company Ltd., 37 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3NU
To Gillian,
Nicholas and James
Then Judas, which had betrayed him, when he saw that he was condemned, repented himself and brought again the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and elders, saying, I have sinned in that I have betrayed the innocent blood. And they said, What is that to us? see thou to that. And he cast down the pieces of silver in the temple, and departed, and went and hanged himself. And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter’s field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day.
Saint Matthew XXVII, w. 3-8
Prologue
It was a good plan. The Chief and his Brigade Officers had worked at it for five weeks.
They knew in which car the target would travel, and which routes his escorts could take between the detached suburban house and the Crown Court. They had the timings on the car, and they knew that all the routes used the same final half mile to the Court buildings.
The weapon was in the city. The weapon and its single projectile were available and waiting. The marksmen were available and waiting. The strike was fixed by the Chief for the Thursday of the following week.
It was a good plan, too good to fail. That it seemed to have failed was a matter of dismal luck, the luck that had haunted the Organization in the last months.
Eammon Dalton and Fran Forde were stopped on the Glen Road at a randomly placed police road block. On another evening the two Volunteers might have carried off the Person Check with indifference, given their names and addresses quietly and calmly, spilled the fictitious every-night story of where they were going, and been cleared and sent on their way. They were heading, when they were waved down, to a final briefing from Brigade. They were nervous and strung taut and they aroused the interest of the heavily armed constables peering down at the two young Catholics’ torch-lit faces. Dalton wouldn’t speak, and Forde gave, in the heat of the moment, an alias which was found a minute later to differ from the name on his driving licence. Dalton swore as soon as Moore had opened his idiot mouth. At first, of course, the policemen didn’t know what they had, but they guessed they had something. Dalton and Forde were pulled out of the car and their hands were spread on the roof and their legs were kicked apart, and they could hear the sergeant feeding the registration of the car into his radio’s microphone - and that was bad luck because the car was a Datsun and the plates had been lifted off a Sierra. They were covered by an Mi carbine and a Sterling SMG, and they stayed very still because they knew the policemen would dearly love to have them break and run, and they knew the fingers were stroking the triggers. The report on the plates came back to the sergeant’s earpiece and the handcuffs clicked on Eammon Dalton and Fran Forde’s wrists. They were hustled to the dark interior of the police landrover.
For these two Volunteers the war was over, for some years at least.
The Chief and his Brigade Operations officer were brought the news of the arrest by courier.
The Chief reflected. The plan was too good to fail just because a piss-arse Volunteer couldn’t remember the bloody name on his driving licence. The weapon was good, but bloody damn useless in the fists of a man who hadn’t been trained for it. He’d learned how useless this prize weapon was in untrained hands when a projectile had overshot an Army Pig vehicle and blasted a Primary classroom, and when a projectile had missed a Pig and hit the front axle of a coal delivery lorry. Dalton and Forde had been trained to use the weapon, they had had the luxury of test firings in a remote Donegal quarry over the border, into the South.
The plan was too good to waste. He had the weapon, but only one projectile. No bastard could make it work on a live first time firing.
The Brigade Operations officer read his mind.
‘I’d do it myself, but. . .’
‘’Course you would, ’course I would and we’d be lucky to hit a bloody wall, let alone a bloody car.’
‘In this city you had two boys only who could use it, both gone . . .’
The frown cut into the Chiefs forehead. ‘What of the old teams, the old boys who used to be trained on it?’
‘One’s shot, one’s in the Kesh, one’s buried for blowing himself away with his own bomb. And one went down South, way back.’
‘Could he still fire it?’
‘Too right, but he went over the border, quit.’
‘Get him,’ the Chief said.
‘He walked out on us - he was good with it, but he quit on us.’
‘Get the fucker back.’
‘He could fire it, if we could get him here.’
‘It’s too good to waste. Get him back.’
1
He rubbed at the condensation on the window and peered out at the slow-moving car.
It was the second time it had cruised past the caravan.
A grey, misted morning. The cloud fog softened the greens of the grass on the canal’s bank and brightened the yellows of the collapsing weed beds and darkened the tarmac of the roadway running beside the straight line of the canal. He had first seen the car when the bird had flapped fast away from the perch he had placed for it in the grass. He always fed the bird at that time.
He moved quickly from the end window to the side window and stretched across the small formica-topped table and his stomach wobbled the sauce bottles he had left out for his tea. His fist smeared against the window so that he could better see the car as it went on up the narrow road towards Vicars-town. His vision was obscured by a wild hedgerow but he made out the red flash of the brake lights, and he knew that the car had stopped. He darted back across the caravan and switched off his radio and strained his ears in the new-found quiet. Very faintly he could hear the drive of the car’s engine as it turned in the roadway and skidded on the verge beside the canal. He saw the bird, apprehensive in a tree across the water, watching.
Then silence. Only the wheeze of his own breathing. His eyes were against the window. He saw no movement from between the hedgerow branches where the brake fights had shone.
He cursed and hurried the three strides back to the end window of the caravan from which he had first seen the car. He looked both ways up the road and he saw nothing.
He went to the door at the back of the caravan, the end away from the road, and opened the door carefully and looked out over the fields to the squat farmhouse two hundred yards away. Smoke from the chimney climbed straight to the cloud ceiling. No sign of fife. Again he strained his ears and heard nothing. He closed the door behind him.
For two years the caravan had been his home. It had a single bunk, a table, a chair, a gas ring, a sink. Behind a curtain near the door was a chemical bucket lavatory. On the wall above the table was a photograph of his wife and one of two of his children. The photographs were fastened to the wall with old, dried out sellotape. His breakfast plate and mug lay in the small sink. Across the width of the caravan, at eye level, hung a string carrying two pairs of pants and some socks and a shirt. Because a cable reached from the farmhouse to the caravan he had the electricity to burn a single-bar fire. The caravan was his home.
He had made out the blurred outline of two men in the front seats each time that the car had passed. He wondered why they waited. Perhaps they worked to a schedule and waited on their watches; perhaps they allowed themselves a cigarette before coming to him.
It was more than a year since he had been visited at the caravan. It had been two detectives then. They’d said they were Crime and he’d known they were Special Branch, and they’d come down from the station at Monasterevan, and they’d looked around and talked gently with him, and said it was only routine, and that if he stayed clean then he’d be left to himself, and that if he went dirty that they’d fucking smash him. The one had looked quietly around the caravan, and the other had spoken with a twinkling eye and a soft Cork brogue. Alright for a Belfast man to live down south, but Jesus had he better be clean . . . Because if he was dirty, if he was Provo dirty, then he was in a heap of shit. And they’d shaken his hand, and called him by his first name and closed the door behind them and gone on their way. He had been clean before they came to the caravan, and clean ever since.
That was the last time that the young kestrel bird had been frightened away at feeding time.
He rubbed again at the window, and tried to see the car and could not.
It was two years since he had taken up the offer of the caravan on the farm of his mother’s cousin. The cousin lived on his own, and didn’t look for a stranger’s company. There was the caravan at the end of the lane, beside the roadway, and it was available for a distant relative who was a refugee from the north. In the summer if there was hay to be cut then he helped, or if there was repair work to be done on a roof of an out-house then he would do it. Mostly weeks went by and he only saw the old man at a distance across the fields. It was a lonely life and Christ for all that it was better than the life he had lived before two years back. Only on a Saturday evening would he take the bicycle into Vicarstown and drink some stout in a bar. He knew that his accent betrayed his origins and wondered what the local men said of him. He was lonely because he did not seek the locals’ company, nor was he given it. When he drank he’d have a plastic carrier bag beside his knee that was filled with sliced loaves and packets of margarine and a pound of rashers and a pound of sausages. He took his milk from the farm, he took his money from a Thursday morning ride to Monsterevan and the unemployment money from the Post Office.
The bird was his only companion. The farmer had taken the fledgeling kestrel from an abandoned nest a month after he had come to the caravan, and fed it on bread and milk and meat scraps to maturity. The bird wasn’t tame, not so it could be touched, but it nested within sight of the farmhouse and the caravan, and it came most days for food. He talked to the bird, softly so as not to frighten it, and it had his bacon rind and slices of raw sausage. The bird wasn’t a prisoner, no clipped wings, no thongs. The bird was free, as he was free since he had come to the new life two years back.
He loved the bird.
Before he had come south he couldn’t have imagined himself as pansy enough to love a pink-tailed kestrel bird. He loved his wife, too, but she was in Belfast. The kestrel bird was with him, and was all the company he had.
Through the window of the caravan he heard the dulled bang and knew it was the slamming of a car door.
If his wife had travelled south with him then he might possibly have wriggled a lasting escape from the life of before two years back, but she said there was no way she was going to exist in a soddin’ field. She said Belfast was bad but it’s where it’s familiar. He’d told her it was a mobile home they could five in, she said it was a soddin’ caravan, and no place for the wee ones. She said she’d prefer to be with her Ma and her Da, and his mates and her friends, and not hidin’ in a soddin’ bog down south. She said she knew why he’d gone, because he had to go, she don’t think the less of him for going. He went back three times the first year, four times the second year. Back to Belfast to be with her, to be with the kids. He hadn’t been for two months, but he’d be back up with her and the kids for Christmas. He often had the radio on inside the caravan, and when the reporters broadcast of house searches and lifts and aggro and shootings in the area where his wife lived, where his kids were, where his Ma and Da were, where her Ma and Da were, then he would suffer a little in his helplessness. But she always said that she understood why he had gone away. She never blamed him. Christ, it would have been easier if she had.
He wiped once more at the window glass. There were two men walking up the centre of the road towards the caravan.
He saw their pale town faces. The taller man wore a cap and the shorter man’s hair was long to his shoulders and his beard covered his throat. The taller man bent and picked a stone off the side of the road and threw it hard and high into the tree where the bird perched and watched the bird fly swiftly away. He grinned as if it pleased him that he had disturbed a picture that had been at peace. The kestrel flew frightened away down the length of the canal. The shorter man retched and coughed and spat and dropped a half-used cigarette into the road where it burned on after he had walked past. They came to the hole that was cut in the hedgerow.
He saw them cock their ears, he saw them turn their heads and swivel their eyes down the road in front of them and behind them.
There was no weapon in the caravan. Weapons were Belfast. He had no need of a weapon to keep him safe in a caravan beside the canal near Vicarstown. The taller man’s jaw was cartwheeling as he chewed at a mouthful of gum. When they were satisfied they came fast through the hole in the hedge. They crossed the long grass that bordered the vegetable patch square that he had dug out in the summer. He saw the grimace of annoyance from the taller man as the wet grass splayed over his shoes. He grew the vegetables for the old man in the farm to-sell to the store in Vicarstown, lettuce in the spring, carrots and parsnips now that it was winter. He saw that they said not a word to each other, and nor did they look up at his face in the caravan window.
He knew it would come and yet he was jolted upright by the rap at the caravan door. His eyes closed. His teeth bit on his lip, and he felt a moment of pain. He dragged a gulp of air down into his chest. He stared at the door, and he saw the inexact outline of the two heads beyond the glaze glass.
The shorter man was standing on the step and was lighting a cigarette and smiled as the door was opened. The taller man showed no visible expression.
‘Yes?’ He tucked the thumb of one hand into his belt, and the other hand was in his trouser pocket. The strangers should not see the tremble in his fingers.
‘McAnally?’ The shorter man spoke with the raw accent of West Belfast. ‘Are you McAnally?’
‘Yes.’
‘Sean Pius McAnally?’
‘Yes.’
And your home, up there, is 63 The Drive in Turf Lodge . . .?’
‘What have you come for?’ He snarled the question because that way his nerves were hidden from them. He disliked them because they had frightened him. He was not a man who should easily have been frightened. No man who had led an Active Service Unit in Turf Lodge, Ballymurphy and Whiterock would admit to fear.
‘Easy, boy.’ The taller man spoke.
‘Come to take you back,’ the shorter man said.
‘Better talked about inside, pissing cold out here,’ the taller man said.
‘Nobody tells me where I’m going.’
‘Like he said, easy . . .’ The shorter man smiled a second time.
McAnally stood aside from the door, made way for the two men to climb up into the caravan. Suddenly the inside of the caravan was crowded, bursting. It was his place of refuge, and it was invaded. They looked around them, they stripped the privacy from the walls. In turn they bent to look at the photographs, at the sink, at the curtain that hid the chemical lavatory seat. The taller man leaned his bottom against the table-edge. The shorter man sat on the chair and stretched out his legs. McAnally closed the door.
‘What do you want?’
‘What I said . . .’ The shorter man dragged far down on his cigarette, went to the door, threw the stub outside, coughed and spat, shut the door, went back to the chair. ‘What I said, come to take you back.’
‘Who says?’
‘It’s what we’ve been told, take you back.’
McAnally thought they might as well have crapped on his floor, on the linoleum, or they might have pissed on his walls, on the photographs. Between the two of them they suffocated the privacy of his refuge, the privacy of the caravan.
‘What’s your name?’ McAnally asked the shorter man.
There was a smile without amusement, without pity. ‘You’ve been away too long ... we don’t like names.’
McAnally laughed, shrill, excited. ‘Because you’re all riddled with touts. Weren’t any touts in my time.’
‘Your time’s not done, Gingy,’ the taller man said.
McAnally rocked slightly on the balls of his feet. That was his name when he was in the war. He was always called ‘Gingy’. All the men liked a name that was short and sharp and familiar. All the men had their nicknames. Ducksy and Cruncher and Puffer and Bronco and Buster and Bluey and Fitzy and . . . He was Gingy because the moustache that was now shaved away had once been redder than his hair. He was Gingy in the Turf Lodge, and Gingy in the A.S.U. He had been Gingy for five years in the Long Kesh prison camp, and Gingy in the Remand Wing of the Crumlin Road gaol. Gingy was his name before two years back.
