Though the Heavens Fall Read online

  Monty was not about to ask whether her father had been involved in the IRA. That was one of many questions you simply did not ask in Belfast. All he said was “And that murder was never solved.”

  “The UDA did it.” That was a Loyalist paramilitary group, Monty knew.

  “You know that?”

  “It would have been them.” When he didn’t respond she said, as if making a comment on the frequency of rain showers in her country, “They’re forever killing Catholics. And fellas in the ’RA.”

  Monty took Katie Flanagan’s phone number before she left and told her he would look into her claim. He knew there was nothing he could do, whether he was in Belfast for five months or five years. If the police had found no indication of anyone else on the bridge that night, Monty wasn’t going to find a smoking gun, speaking figuratively; he wasn’t going to discover a file folder sitting on a shelf somewhere with all the details of Eamon Flanagan’s demise, allowing Monty to launch a suit, win a judgment for damages from the hitherto unknown but now remorseful defendant, and see Mr. Flanagan’s family live happily and prosperously ever after.

  Chapter IV

  Father Brennan Burke

  Brennan began a new ministry on Wednesday, February 1. His new parish was on the Crumlin Road in Ardoyne, north Belfast. Holy Cross. He liked the big old stone church with its twin spires, and he found the other priests congenial. The job had an extra perk he had not anticipated: he was asked to assist in the teaching of music at Holy Cross Girls’ School. Good to keep his hand in, in case he managed to snag the choir director job in Rome. But even without that prospect on the horizon, he loved doing music with children. Imprinting the great traditional music on their souls early in life, so it would be a part of them forever. He remembered hearing a story about music legend Frank Zappa: Zappa said he sometimes found himself, during a guitar solo, incorporating into it the medieval Kyrie that had been sung at his confirmation.

  After spending the morning at Holy Cross, Brennan headed back to Andersonstown. He decided to cater lunch for his hosts, which he did by putting in an order at the counter of a local chipper and lugging the bags home on the bus. Ronan got home from work shortly after Brennan, and they all dug in to some very greasy, very tasty fish and chips. When they had finished, Gráinne asked Father Burke whether he had ever been to the Milltown Cemetery.

  “I’ve been in there but never long enough to make the rounds.”

  “Well, I’d like to go say a prayer and lay flowers on the grave of a young girl who died fifteen years ago this week. She was the youngest daughter of a family I grew up with.”

  Brennan gathered up the wrappings of their meal and put them in the bin. “I’ll go with you to the cemetery, if that would be all right.”

  “I’d like that, Brennan.”

  “We’ll all go,” said Ronan, and they made ready to depart.

  Gráinne went into a back room and returned with a bouquet of white lilies. Brennan followed her out of the house and to a black car that was parked outside. She motioned to the back seat with her hand and Brennan stepped back to allow her to enter first. There was one man at the wheel and another in the front passenger seat. The driver had a shaved head, the other cropped dark brown hair; both looked fit and alert. Gráinne greeted them, though not by name, and they gave her a friendly nod. The passenger opened his door, got out, and started to walk to the house. Brennan saw Ronan emerge and look around him. He waved the security man off, and the man returned to the front seat. Ronan got into the back with his wife and cousin and spoke to the men in Irish, so fast Brennan couldn’t catch it all. The men laughed, and the driver turned the key and started the car.

  They drove along the Andersonstown Road. When they got to the Falls Road, the driver pulled over and parked. The front passenger got out and scanned the area. Nothing was amiss apparently, and they all disembarked, the bodyguards sticking close to their charges. They both turned at once to the sound of a motor on the road. A small, battered-looking brown hatchback had stopped behind the black car. When one of Ronan’s men put his hand in his right pocket and started towards the car, it pulled out and sped away down the Glen Road. Brennan paid it no more mind. A cold, drizzling rain began to fall, but he, Gráinne, and Ronan ignored it and walked to the big stone archway with a cross on top, which marked the entrance to the cemetery.

  The graveyard is one of the most potent symbols of nationalism in the country, a Catholic burial ground that holds the graves of Republicans who died in the struggle to alter the course of Irish history. Brennan recognized many of the names on the gravestones, including Bobby Sands, Kieran Doherty, and the eight other H Block hunger strikers. Irish tricolours and Republican symbols marked out the landscape. The grave marker for Deirdre Ryan showed that she was eighteen when she died in 1980, shortly after being released from the Armagh prison. One look at Gráinne’s face as she tenderly laid a bouquet beside the granite marker made it clear that she was still grieving for Deirdre after all these years. Ronan whispered to Brennan, “She was imprisoned for Republican activities and never recovered from the strip searches and the beatings she received at the hands of the screws. Male screws.” No one could have missed the raw anger in his voice.

  “The fools, the fools, the fools,” Brennan said softly.

  “They have left us our Fenian dead.” Ronan completed the quotation from Pádraig Pearse. “While Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree shall never be at peace.”

  It made Brennan wonder all over again at the compromises his cousin had to make, with others and himself, in order to abandon the “physical force tradition” and support the peace process.

  Brennan gazed down at the grave. He made the sign of the cross and quietly recited prayers in Latin and in Irish for Deirdre Ryan.

  After they had paid their respects, they headed out towards the Falls Road. The wind had picked up, driving the rain into their faces. Any time he had glanced at Ronan’s bodyguards during the cemetery visit, Brennan noticed that one pair of light grey eyes and one pair of green were in constant motion as the two men scanned their surroundings. Now, as the group approached the street, one of the men moved to the front of the small procession and the other walked behind.

  Brennan heard a shout before he was able to focus on its source. “Save your prayers, you fuckin’ Taigs; all them Fenian scum are rotting in hell!” The brown hatchback had returned to the scene; it must have been lurking on a side street. Men screamed from the open windows of the car, their faces contorted with hate.

  Ronan’s two minders had both reached into their jackets and moved in front of the Burkes, but Ronan said, “They’re all noise and no light.” And sure enough, after spewing some more verbal abuse, they peeled away and drove out of sight.

  “There’s no sacred ground for some,” Brennan muttered.

  “We’ve seen worse on this holy ground,” Ronan said. “I was here in ’88.”

  Brennan knew all about ’88. Thousands, including the Sinn Féin leadership, were on hand for an IRA funeral, when a lone gunman appeared and starting shooting and lobbing grenades at the mourners.

  “I was limping around, useless,” Ronan said, “while some of our young lads went after the killer. Unarmed our boys were, but that didn’t stop them. They kept after him, and him armed with a gun and grenades. Three were killed and more than sixty wounded.”

  “Including this fella himself,” said Gráinne. “He says he was useless, but that’s because his leg was torn open by shrapnel!”

  A despicable attack upon mourners at a funeral, no question. Brennan was not about to bring up the fact that the three who were buried that day, two men and a woman, had been, apparently, on their way to cause an explosion at the changing of the guard of a British Army regiment in Gibraltar when they were killed. Whatever they had been up to, they were unarmed when they were shot down on the street by members of the British Special Air Services,
the SAS. Whatever their intended crimes, the remedy would have been arrest and trial, not summary execution. The entire history of these Troubles — this war — was a cycle of action and reaction, attack and revenge, and, if there was such a term, counter-revenge. Brennan kept his thoughts to himself.

  “The Milltown killer was sentenced to something like seven hundred years for those and other murders,” Ronan said.

  “I suspect somebody else will come forward to fill in for him while he’s away serving those centuries in the lockup.”

  “No doubt, Brennan. We have to get past all this. Our talks will have to lead to a future without all this fucking violence and intimidation.”

  On the way back to Andytown in the car, Brennan asked his cousin about the peace process.

  “What they’re talking about . . .”

  “Don’t be modest now, Ronan,” his wife said and then to Brennan, “He is included in the ‘they.’ He’s been in on the talks, behind the scenes.”

  They continued the conversation as they walked into the house.

  “You can be sure I’m only a minor player when you consider that the talks involve us here in the North and the governments in Dublin and London. But, yes, I’ve had a part in it. They’re hoping to publish something soon. The negotiations are paying lip service to full respect for, and protection of, the rights and identities of both traditions in Ireland. The Reverend Ian Paisley has condemned it as a ‘one-way street to Dublin.’ Another Unionist leader said it amounts to an eviction notice for Ulster to leave the United Kingdom. That tells me there really is something in it for our side!”

  “That does speak well of the project, I’d have to say.”

  “It does, go deimhin.” Ronan looked at Brennan. “What could go wrong?”

  “What could go right?” The voice of Ronan’s son Lorcan came to them from the dining room. Lorcan was dark like his brother Tomás, but short and wiry while Tom was tall and muscular. Brennan went in to greet him and was greeted in turn. There was another fellow with him, a few years older than Lorcan. He had short dark hair neatly combed to the side, almost a little boy’s haircut, but there was nothing boyish about the pumped-up muscles or the cold grey eyes that examined Brennan before greetings were exchanged. He was introduced simply as Carrick. He stood, gave Brennan a “Hi ye” and a curt nod, then sat down again and turned his attention to a batch of newspapers on the table.

  Brennan had made plans to attend a special Mass for peace later that afternoon at the Clonard Monastery, so he went up to his room and changed into a dry set of clerical clothing. While he was bent over tying the laces of his priestly black brogues, he heard raised voices from below. And when he got downstairs and started into the dining room, he walked into a firestorm. Father and son were both on their feet, glaring at one another.

  “Would you catch yerself on, Da?” Lorcan was nearly shouting. “If we go down your road, partition will never end, and all our men, all our volunteers who died to unite this country, died for absolutely nothing. They didn’t die for another fucking assembly at Stormont. They didn’t die for the Brits and their Loyalist killing squads to keep running things in the Six Counties. They died for full independence, Brits out, and a united thirty-two county republic! Nothing less than that. And you, of all people. You’ve been an IRA man all your adult life. You, of all people, to be giving us up!”

  Ronan kept his voice down, but there was no mistaking the iron in his tone. “I’m not saying for one minute that I’d be satisfied with less than an independent republic! The institutions they’re talking about now, we’ll work within them, subvert them to our own ends. We will have a united Ireland someday.”

  “A stepping stone to a full republic. Sounds as if Michael Collins has returned to life and is standing in this very room.”

  “Well, he was proved right, wasn’t he? The Free State eventually got rid of every vestige of British rule. The Commonwealth, the oath, all done away with. An Irish Republic to the south of us.”

  Brennan stood on the sidelines and didn’t say a word.

  “I can’t believe I’m hearing that out of your mouth,” Lorcan continued. “They’re to the south of us because the border is still here. And if you think the Unionists are going to go along peacefully with an Irish Republic, you must be back on the drink.”

  “Well, we can’t force them the way things are now, because they’re in the majority. But over time —”

  “When you say they are a majority, you’re recognizing the border.”

  “I’m recognizing reality.”

  “They are a minority on this island. The only reason they have a majority in the North is because the border was drawn for that very reason, drawn to include heavily Protestant-Unionist areas, so they would outnumber our people and be able to outvote us into eternity. Which is exactly what will happen.”

  Carrick stayed silent at the table, but his red face and clenched fists spoke volumes.

  “And so,” Ronan said, “the solution is to keep trying to shoot them and bomb them into submission.”

  “They have tried all through history to shoot us and burn us out of our homes. Finally we decided not to submit anymore. You were there when the Provisionals took up arms. You knew then it was the only way to defend our communities. Force is the only language the Brits understand. They don’t respond to anything else.”

  “They responded to Gandhi. Nonviolent resistance got them out of India.”

  “Jesus Christ, what are you saying now? You’re doing my head in! You’ve seen the Brits’ response to nonviolent protest in this country: Bloody Sunday. Twenty-seven unarmed protesters were shot. Fourteen of them died. And the soldiers who did that weren’t punished, were they? Some of them were promoted. Before the year was out, one of them was decorated by the Queen. Remember, Da?”

  “Don’t you dare lecture me about Bloody Sunday, as if I could ever, ever forget such an atrocity against our people!”

  “Fine, then.” Lorcan brushed past his father, and his companion did the same. They both headed for the door. Lorcan turned back and said, “Don’t you be lecturing me about Gandhi. Gandhi got thrown into prison. He got partition. Sound familiar to you?”

  “And,” said Carrick, looking directly into Ronan’s eyes, “he came to a bad end, didn’t he.”

  Ronan Burke, the guerrilla warrior, the former second in command of the Belfast Brigade of the Provisional IRA, the reformed drunk and rededicated family man, was without words. White-faced, stricken. Brennan felt sick. Here it was all over again, father against son, brother against brother. Just like the Irish Civil War more than seventy years before.

  There had been no need to spell it out. Gandhi had been assassinated.

  Chapter V

  Monty

  Monty spent Thursday afternoon negotiating a settlement with an opposing solicitor in the case of a client who had slipped in a puddle of spilled dish detergent in MacAllister’s, a Belfast grocery store, and sustained a bruised tailbone and a broken string of beads. When it was all over, Monty walked away with the sum of £1,200 for his client. The hourly rates normally charged by himself and the defence lawyer, calculated over the time it took to settle the claim, far exceeded the amount of the payout. He tried not to be snooty about it, even in his own mind. But he wouldn’t even get a good story out of it. If the woman had, say, broken her rosary beads, splaying fifty-three Hail Marys and a few Glory Bes all over the floor of MacAllister’s Protestant grocery shop, he might have made a barroom tale out of that. But no, it was just costume jewellery, pink plastic beads. Even the fact that what she slipped in was Fairy Liquid, as the well-known brand of washing-up detergent was called, wouldn’t get him a pint of warm beer over here.

  He was waiting for a new load of documents from Canadian Earth but he didn’t expect them for a couple of days. So, with nothing better to do, literally, Monty got out the thin file he had ope
ned on the Flanagan case. He had researched the law after Katie’s visit and found that she was right: her mother was not entitled to a widowed mother’s allowance because she was never actually married to Eamon. Now Monty looked at the photocopy of the autopsy report. There was nobody to even try to claim damages from on this one, but he perused the file. He hated that word beloved of lawyers, perused; did anyone else ever use the word? He doubted it. Anyway, Flanagan. Found dead in a riverbed with multiple fractures. Occipital and parietal bones of the skull. Back of the head. The rib fractures were in the back, too. Posterior. So he fell backwards. Unlikely to have gone that way if he jumped. Not impossible of course. Who knows how the mind works in those last desperate seconds of a suicide? Left tibial fracture. That’s the front bone of the lower leg. So, one fracture in the front, all the rest in the back. Is that something that would happen if he fell and tumbled about on the rocks? If it happened that way, why were there no other injuries to his face or the front of his body? Taking the point of view of the Flanagan family, that something had happened to Eamon before he went off that bridge, what would that have been? If someone attacked him, would the attacker go for his lower leg? Not likely. But there was another possibility. Monty had seen fractures like this in his personal injury practice at home. More than one pedestrian had been hit by a car and suffered a fracture to the tibia as a result. The bumper of a small car would hit an average size or tall man in the front of the leg below the kneecap. Had Eamon Flanagan been the victim of a hit and run that propelled him off the bridge to the riverbed below?

  Monty was loath to get Katie Flanagan’s hopes up, but he could not sit and do nothing if there was even a remote possibility of solving the question of her father’s death. He picked up the phone and called her.

  “Hello.” Her voice had the hollowness of someone having a very bad day. He could hear a child crying in the background. There was a loud crash, and the crying turned to a wail.