The stuff we’ve all found out now, you wouldn’t believe. There were secrets concealed within secrets, leaks and surprises. Whether you’re planning on killing or trying to stop it, you need to suck up wee pieces of information. Someone needs to tell you all the little things that someone else doesn’t want you to know.
Official fingers became unofficially busy in paramilitary pies, encouraging an informer here, protecting another one there. The British made decisions in which means and ends formed knots that proved hard to untangle: information sometimes came from the best of people, sometimes from the very worst. Later these stories started to drift up from history, bulging and distorted, lost toys stirred from the bottom of a stagnant well.
I picked up a London listings magazine about six months ago; flicking through it for a film to watch, I came across an article about a guy called Gerry Maguire. It was publicising a club night he was running: ‘This week the legendary Belfast-born DJ returns to Free London, spinning his celebrated mixture of trance, funk and house until the early hours.’ Belfast-born. I looked more closely at the photograph: a good-looking fella a bit younger than me with light brown hair and a carefully shaped wee beard, wearing a T-shirt with a logo of something fashionable I didn’t understand on it. He looked vaguely familiar.
I read on, noting that the interview was conducted in a style faintly breathless with respect, as if the journalist had pressed his face against the window of a more desirable life. There was talk of summers in mega-clubs in Ibiza and Gerry being flown halfway across the world to DJ at private parties. What music, the journalist asked, did Gerry himself like to get up and groove to? Gerry replied: ‘I don’t dance that much myself, because I injured my leg in a childhood accident. But it’s definitely my job to keep everyone else up on the dance floor.’
Then I got it. It was a long time since I had last seen that face, but I was pretty sure now that it was the adult incarnation of bleached-blond Gerard, my neighbour from the hospital ward.
I went back and reread his quotes. A ‘childhood accident’. You can say that again, with baseball bats in it. I felt a surge of pride in him, for tying a bandage over his past and carrying on, armour-plating himself in success.
Who would have thought he’d get so far? It’s the fashion now to applaud people who publicly confront their old tormentors, dragging them through court cases and giving the spectators in the gallery a good show. That takes courage, sure, but it’s not for everyone. Sometimes when you’ve looked hatred in the eye you just want to sprint away, far enough to stop it from ever touching you again. You don’t want to say its name out loud, even softly under your breath, in case it somehow hears and suddenly bounds back towards you, fast and fierce as a cheetah. You have to get your own back just by living.
A bit of me wanted to contact Gerry though and say: hey, remember me from back then? Well done you, the pair of us didn’t turn out so badly after all. I worried that I would just be poking about in the past, pulling apart his carefully tied bandage, but on the other hand I really wanted to see him. So I looked up his agent’s address online and wrote him a note marked ‘personal’. On the way to the café one bleak morning I threw it into the mouth of the postbox like someone pitching a bottle into the sea.
I had thought about the note carefully. It didn’t say too much, just in case anyone else read it.
Dear Gerry, I read an interview with you the other day and I was wondering if you are the Gerry who was in the bed next to me in the Royal Victoria Hospital in Belfast way back in 1995. If so, I’m glad you’ve done so well. If you ever want to come by and say hello I own a café called Two Shots in Noonan Street in Soho and I’m usually in there in the daytime. If I don’t see you then all the very best and keep up with the music, Jacky.
I put my address on the envelope. It wasn’t like me to seek someone out, but all at once I missed him. Maybe once or twice in your life it suddenly gets lonely when you have no one to talk to about all the stuff you thought you wanted to forget. Weeks went by, and I wondered if the letter had got lost in the post, or if he’d got it and winced a little and quietly crumpled it up. A bit of me felt like an eejit for having written.
Then one afternoon who but Gerry himself should walk into the half-empty café, looking around for me. I had someone else working on the counter. ‘I’m over here,’ I shouted from the back of the shop and when he finally saw me his face snapped into a wide smile. He came over and we gave each other an awkward hug – years in London had chipped away at our early reticence – and I stepped back to take a good look at him, at all the new ways he’d put himself together. He was wearing dark skinny jeans and a nifty wee trilby like a travelling jazz musician. When he moved towards the corner table I saw that he had learned to carry even his faint limp elegantly, a trace of damage that he now wore as nonchalantly as a scarf.
‘Look at you,’ I marvelled. ‘Like a hipster Frankie Sinatra.’
He thought I was taking the mickey.
‘Look at you,’ he said, smiling. ‘You called your café Two fucking Shots? What’s that about?’
Close up I could see that his white, even teeth were not of the sort ordinarily bequeathed by our native city. They had clearly undergone some subtly expensive dental work.
‘It’s a reference to coffee,’ I said. ‘Two shots of coffee.’
‘Yeah, better be,’ he said. ‘Make mine three. I’m fucking knackered after last night.’
He swore the way I remembered, rhythmically and without any malice, but there was an international patina to his accent now, a softening drawl buttered across his Belfast vowels. I had trained myself not to swear in front of Elsie. Cursing came unnaturally to me, but to hear him at it again felt relaxing, like he was rolling us a cigarette to share.
We sat down and he told me all about the DJ-ing and how things had started to go right when a promoter spotted him playing trance music in Belfast and offered him a gig in London and before long the jobs were trickling and then flooding in, even from outside the UK. His constant music references – dubstep, downtempo, breakbeat, hardcore – were all gobbledegook to me. For myself I liked live soul nights in down-at-heel old men’s pubs, but it did me good to see his face all quick and bright at how life had panned out for him. He was still eating up his success like a ripe peach, with the juice of it running down his chin. There were no kids yet, he said, but he had met a woman he liked and I got the feeling that procreation had become a dangling possibility. The fine lines around his eyes signalled it might be time.
He went back to Belfast now and then to see his parents, he said, and recently in the city centre he had bumped into a fella who – the week after he’d finally come home from hospital, shakily bolted back together – had stopped to holler at him from across the street: ‘Ye got what ye deserved.’ But the fella must have forgotten all about that because now he came up to Gerry like an old pal, saying he’d seen him in the magazines and as a favour would he think about playing a wee birthday gig downtown some time in a particular club the fella had in mind.
‘What did you say to him?’ I asked.
‘I told him in no uncertain terms to fuck off.’
In no uncertain terms. I enjoyed that. Gerry asked about me and briskly satisfied himself that my life was in good shape, like a clear-headed doctor checking up on the people who are still walking around after a train crash. He still pulsated to a fast beat.
And then, after all that, he suddenly started talking about Frankie Dunne. I suspected there weren’t that many people he could talk about Dunne with. Maybe that was the real reason why he had come. It had clearly been sitting on his mind.
‘Do you remember the fella I told you about once in the hospital, the Provo that beat me for joyriding?’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you remember his name?’
‘Aye,’ I said, ‘Frankie Dunne.’
‘Well, it turns out Frankie was a tout,’ he said. ‘He was one of the IRA’s chief inquisitors, and a very busy, chatty tout. He went around interrogating and stiffing people left right and centre for supposedly squealing to the Brits while he was doing the same himself, non-stop. For years he was one of the juiciest sources they had, the gift that kept on gabbing. It’s all come out.’
He took a large bite out of his custard tart and rocked back in his chair, cheeks bulging, to see my reaction.
‘Where is he now?’
‘Nobody knows,’ Gerry said. ‘Vanished. Incommunicado. I don’t think it’s in anyone’s interests to hear that bastard singing in public.’ He gave a sharp laugh: ‘Although I’d fucking well like to hear it.’
Gerry looked at his watch, made an alarmed face and quickly downed the last of his strong coffee.
‘Good coffee,’ he said. ‘Look him up. A bit of it’s got out already. There’ll be a lot more where that came from.’
He gave me another wee half-hug: ‘Well, sure I know where to find you now.’ With all the gigs and the travel, he’d got good at leaving gracefully. He was off to eat sushi with his manager, he said. I watched him as he walked out of the door and into the soft promise of the summer evening in Soho, navigating the clogged pavements full of outdoor drinkers as he checked the messages on his phone. I wondered if I’d ever see him again.
I did indeed look Dunne up, and the more I read about him, the more I thought that as a teenager Gerard had a very near miss. It seemed that for Dunne the decision to cross the line between a maiming and a murder could depend on something quite trivial, like how he felt about the quality of his lunch. There were pictures along with the news stories and, later, some longer feature pieces.
Dunne was a burly man with reddish, receding hair, a human pit bull who zealously sniffed out treachery against Irish republicanism wherever he imagined it was lurking, with the exception of his own interior. Those with experience of him told reporters that beneath his superficial conviviality lay a terrible coldness. Some people felt the chill too late to get away.
Dunne’s sniffing went on all the time, setting nerves on edge, but the sniffing and the edginess became so constant that sometimes people almost forgot it was there, like the rain pattering on the roof. Then a thin trace of something would come floating on the air towards him. A rumour, a nervy laugh, an operation gone awry. Something that didn’t quite sit right, something that snagged on the consciousness.
Something that snagged. It passed across the pit bull’s flared nostrils. Sniff, sniff, and Dunne was on the scent. He conducted his enquiries with energetic capability, exuding the heavy musk of intimidation. He followed betrayals, but what he was really after was the exhilarating stench of fear. That came next.
It trickled out over the next few months, like a line of blood from under a locked door, the story of Dunne and his friends. They had abducted men, and women too. Some captives were fathers or mothers, some were kids hardly out of their teens, some were in the IRA and some weren’t; they were taken up alleyways or driven away in the dark, down hopeless, nameless little rural lanes, on and on until finally the car stopped and they were shoved out faltering and afraid. Their tormentors would play wee tricks and jokes, kidding people they were about to be freed when in fact they were seconds from death.
There were much the same ingredients in every story, doled out in different measures. There was extreme pain, dispensed with ingenuity, or the intimate threat of it. Sometimes those held were in trouble because they had spoken out of turn, or lost the plot momentarily and punched a more senior IRA man. Maybe, with youthful folly, they had ignored the organisation and tried a small-time crime spree of their own. But most often the charge against the prisoner – the one that could turn bowels to liquid – was that he or she had been touting, passing on information that helped the British Army or the police.
Tout was a bad word. It stank of shame and brutal retribution. It sprawled obscenely across gable walls, inviting trouble, turning nods and smiles to cold glares of suspicion. Tout could stick to you like wet tar.
The enforcers kept to due process, all right: their own version of it. They would often compel the captive to make a tape recording admitting alleged crime, a stuttering confession which was retained as evidence that IRA justice had been done.
The process could take hours or days. The prisoner would cling to the dwindling hope that there was still a way out, a narrow tunnel through violence or shame or some as yet unspecified bargain which would permit them to crawl on their belly back to life. It had happened before to others, maybe it would happen again.
I keep pondering the moment when they finally realised that there was to be no way back, when they understood that this petered-out country road or that particular room, with its stained mug of tea and the nondescript blanket on the bed, was the last one they would see. The fine drizzle that flecked the windowpane would be the last rain: there would be no more of anything. The thought of them trapped there in that condition of knowing haunts me, their loneliness drifting across the decades like smoke on the wind.
And when I think of that I also sometimes think of McGee leaving the newsagent’s cellar that grey morning, walking stiffly back out into the short portion of his life that was left.
Dunne wasn’t alone in executing his duties. He just added some extra spin to the game. Even before his era, back in the 1970s, the IRA had killed local people who offended them and left the bodies by the road as a warning to others. At times they took to burying the bodies at night in the bogland. Then the captives just disappeared, gulped down by the soggy earth.
Their relatives never knew where they had vanished to, or even why. The disappeared existed only in hushed talk and creased photographs showing them with awkward smiles, in haircuts and clothes from the decade they had died in, sideburns and perms, flares or drainpipe jeans. Time dumped them there and ran on without them.
One was the widowed mother of ten children. After she was seized from the family home in West Belfast one night, her youngest children huddled close together for weeks like frightened puppies, with their fifteen-year-old sister struggling to play the role of mammy. The authorities were eventually alerted to what was going on, whereupon they promptly separated the children from each other and dispatched them to various institutions.
For many years Dunne was one of the prized British sources at the heart of the IRA, tipping them off as to who was planning what, when and how. He saved lives with his information and took others with his gun. As his story came out, I became fascinated with this man. Inside him, pulverised by his contradictions, what kind of dust was left, what smear of essence?
Dunne was different from other informers, not least in the enigma of his motivations. He was never touched or harmed by anyone. There was a good reason: for the longest time he gave everyone above him exactly what they needed. For the IRA he was the cheerful enforcer of internal discipline, the whistling butcher who was endlessly willing to roll up his sleeves and plunge into stomach-churning tasks that others avoided. For the British he held the key to the IRA cupboard of secrets. Either master could potentially have destroyed him, so he dutifully served them both.
So Dunne wasn’t a psychopathic zealot after all. He was a psychopathic pragmatist, the poster boy for everything the Troubles became once the last of the fantasies dribbled out of them. He took care of business. He sucked up the cash. He played the ball, in all its intricate moves. He stayed on his feet until the final whistle blew. Dunne’s hidden away somewhere now, hardly anyone knows exactly where. The main thing is, he’s still alive.