Chapter 11
Within four hours of the first broadcast of Theresa’s death a soldier had been killed and heavy rioting had broken out in the Ballymurphy, Whiterock, Turf Lodge and New Barnsley estates.
The soldier had died when he was hit by a burst of shots fired at close range from a Thompson sub-machine-gun. He was last man in a patrol in Ballymurphy, and the gunman was apparently operating from the top floor of an empty council house. Some of the photographers who had gathered outside Theresa’s house to get a picture of her parents and collect a holiday snapshot of the girl herself ran in the direction of the shooting. The fleetest managed a few hurried frames as the soldiers lifted the body of their colleague into the back of a Saracen.
In the Falls and Springfield Roads, groups of youths had hijacked buses, driven them into the middle of the street, and set fire to them. After that the army moved in. Armoured cars and Land-Rovers were pelted with milk bottles and rocks by the crowds who had gathered on the pavements. The army responded by driving at them, firing volleys of rubber bullets from mountings beside the driver. At one building site a barricade of rocks and oil drums had been assembled by the time the Saracens arrived. They’d crashed into the flimsy wall, fracturing it and scattering the drums crazily across the street, when a lone youth, at the controls of a brilliant-yellow excavator-digger machine, charged back defiantly. The troops, who had been advancing behind the cover of the armoured cars, fell back as the mechanical dinosaur accelerated down a slight hill towards the toad-like armoured cars. A few feet from the impact the youth jumped clear, leaving his runaway digger to collide head on with the Saracens. The armoured cars, acting in strange concert for things so large, edged it against a wall, where it spent its force revving in demented futility.
The stoning went on a long time. Unit commanders made it clear in their situation reports to Brigade headquarters at Lisburn that they detected a genuine anger among people. Those who over the last months had shown disinclination to abuse and pelt the military were back with a vengeance. There were rumours, they said, sweeping the Catholic areas, that the girl who had killed herself in the police station had been tortured to a degree that she could stand no more, and that she had then killed herself. Provisional sympathizers were on the move off the main roads where the army patrolled, and behind the crowds, giving instructions.
Theresa’s parents were on lunchtime television, maintaining that their daughter had never belonged to any Republican organization. They described graphically how she had been taken from the lunch table the previous day. The army press desk received scores of calls, and stalled by saying this was a police matter, that the army was not involved, and pointing out that the girl had died in a police station. At police headquarters the harassed man on the receiving end told reporters that an investigation was still going on, and that the officers who were carrying out that investigation had not called back yet.
Both at army headquarters and amongst the Secretariat that administered the Secretary of State’s office at Stormont Castle there was a realization that something rather better by way of explanation was going to have to come out before the day was over.
Faced with crises the Prime Minister had a well-tried formula to fall back upon. Identify the problem. Focus all attention on it. Solve it, and then leave it alone. When he finally concentrated on any one subject his aides found he had enormous capacity to wrestle with whatever political abscess was causing the pain. But they also found that once he thought the situation dealt with then his interest faded as fast as it had risen. Northern Ireland, comparatively quiet for months, was now on the shelved list. It teetered close to what a politician had once called the ‘acceptable level of violence’. So the transcripts of the lunchtime news bulletins that were brought to him he resented as an intrusion. Violence back again. Streets closed. Casualties. The distasteful death of a young girl in the police cell. It was his habit to be direct.
From the back room office overlooking the Downing Street gardens, insipid in the November light, too many leaves left around, he called the army commander in Lisburn. Without any interruption he listened to a rundown of the morning’s events, and made no comment either when the General launched into the background of the girl’s arrest. He was told for the first time of the intelligence reports that had been fed in from London, of her questioning, what little she had admitted to knowing, and then of the finding of the body.
‘Is this the first we’ve had from our chap?’
‘First that I’ve heard of. Certainly we’ve received nothing else we could act on.’
‘And it was good stuff, accurate. Something we hadn’t had before, right?’
‘The information was factual. It didn’t take us as far as we’d hoped it might at first. I understand, though, that this is the first positive line we’ve had on the fellow we’re looking for.’
‘Seems we set a bit of a trap, and it’s rather missed its target. We’ll have to decide whether our chap’s had as much out of the pot as he’s going to get. Problem is at what stage to get him out, whether we’ve compromised him already.’ He was enjoying this, just like the way it was in the war. SOE and all that. The general cut across the line.
‘It’s not so easy, Prime Minister. It’s faintly ridiculous, but I’m told his controllers don’t know where he is, don’t even know where to get in touch with him. You appreciate that this chap is not being controlled from here. Your instructions were interpreted very strictly on this point. It’s London’s responsibility. He calls in, they don’t call him. But my advice would be that he stays. For the moment, at least. When you begin this sort of thing you stick with it. There’s no out, in, midstream, because it’s a bit too hot. He’ll have to finish it, or dry up completely.’
The Prime Minister came back, ‘We’ve no reason to believe yet that he’s been compromised? But it would be difficult, very difficult, if he were to be identified in this context.’
‘Those were the sorts of questions I assume had been answered before the instruction was given to launch this operation, Prime Minister.’
The sarcasm bit down the line.
The Prime Minister banged the phone down, then immediately flipped the console button on his desk and asked abruptly for the Secretary of State in Stormont Castle. After forty-one years in politics he could see the storm clouds gathering long before they were upon him. He knew the time had come to pull in some sail, and close down the hatches. The combination of an agent working to the Prime Minister’s orders and a teenage girl hanging herself in a cell were better ingredients than most for a political scandal of major proportions. He must start to plan his defensive lines if the worst should happen and the chap they’d sent over there should be discovered. That bloody General, not much time to run over there and his next appointment already confirmed. Entrenched, which was why he was so free with the advice. But all the same, in spite of his eminence, it must have hurt him to admit that this was the best information they’d had so far… and for all that they’d loused it up.
‘He won’t have liked it. One bright thing today,’ and then he turned his attention to the search for a fail-safe system. Call the Under-Secretary, the man in charge of this incredible non-communication set-up. In the event of catastrophe no statement till the civil servant had cleared it, and get that away to Lisburn. No acknowledgement for the agent, of course, if all goes wrong… deny all knowledge of the mission.