‘You don’t know a bloody thing about what goes on. Not a bloody thing. You know nothing. Nothing. Shut up. Shut your bloody face…’
She taunted him, trying to act it with her voice to overcome the fear. ‘They don’t want you any more. You’re outnumbered, living off the backs of people. Without your guns you’re nothing—’
He shouted back across to her. ‘What do you know of the way we live? What do you know of what support we have? All you see is what’s on the bloody television. You don’t know what life is like in the Falls, with murdering bastards like your husband to beat the shit out of boys and girls. We’re doing people a service when we kill fucking swine like that husband of yours.’
‘My husband never killed anyone.’ She said it as a statement of fact. Safe.
‘He told you that, did he?’ Very precise, low and hissing the words out. ‘Pity you never asked him what sort of little chat he had with the wee girl that hanged herself in the cells at Springfield.’
She had built herself towards the climax. Now he watched with relish the demolition. She remembered reading about the girl, though it had not been mentioned at home. Work rarely was. The rebuttal caught her hard, draining her. The hands. Hold on to the hands, and concentrate on them. The only lifeline is the hands. The left knuckle was white on the barrel, blood drained out from round the bones. He was holding the rifle with both hands as he brought it up across his face to wipe his forehead with the sleeve on his right arm. He was sweating.
‘You’re nothing, are you? That’s all you’re fit for. Sitting in people’s homes with guns, guarding women and wee bairns. You’re a rat, a creeping, disease-ridden little rat. Is that what the great movement is about? Killing people in their homes?’
Her voice was battering it out now, watching the anger rise first in his neck and spread through the lower jaw, tension, veins hardening and protruding. Safe. What can the gun do now that would not rouse the neighbours who lived through the thin brick-and-cement walls of the estate just a few feet from her own bungalow?
‘You’ve made it all out wrong, Mrs Rennie. Whatever your bloody man says you don’t kill the Provos just by locking a few up. We are of the people. Don’t you know that? The people are with us. You’ve lost, you are the losers. Your way of life, God-given superiority, is over and finished, not us… We’re winning. We’re winning because the people support us. Go into Andytown, or the Murph or the Ardoyne or Turf Lodge. Go in there and ask them about Provo rule. Then ask them what they think of RUC scum.’
He was shouting, half-rising out of the flower-covered seat of the chair. The rifle was now only in the right hand, but with the finger still close to the trigger. His left arm was waving above his head.
The hatred between the two was total. His fury was fanned by the calmness she showed in face of the rifle, and the way she had made him shout and the speed with which he had lost his control. Her loathing for the Republicans, bred into her from the cradle, gave her strength. With something near detachment she weighed the pluses and minuses of rushing him there and then. He was gripping the gun, but it was pointed away from the family. There was no possibility that she could succeed. She felt the children’s grip on her arms. If she surged suddenly across the room she would carry them like two anchors halfway with her.
He was not so calm now, and she saw the hint in his eye that he felt the claustrophobia of the room, that the time he had sat in the chair had sapped that sense of initiative and control that were so important to him. She remembered a young Catholic boy who had come round her father’s store, idling or loitering or just with nothing to do, and how her father had pulled him up by the front of his collar, and shaken him like an animal to find what he was doing there, on the corner outside the shop. And there had been then the trapped-rodent fear of the youth, of the second-grade boy, who accepted that this would happen, and ran when released, feeling himself lucky not to be thrashed. In the eyes of the man across from her was the hint that he knew he no longer dominated the situation.
When Rennie turned into the cul-de-sac he noted immediately that the garage interior light was not switched on. He stopped his car forty yards from the bottom of the road, and turned off his engine and lights. The bungalow seemed quite normal. The curtains were drawn, but there was a slice of light through the gap where they had been pulled not quite together, from the hall light filtering through the patterned and coloured glass. Everything as it should be.
But no light in the garage. For months now it had been a set routine that an hour or so before he was expected Janet would go into the kitchen and switch on the light in the garage. They kept the garage empty, without the clutter that the neighbours stored there. That way there was no hiding place for an assassin.
The detective sat in the car, watching, allowing himself some minutes just to look at the house and search in front of him in detail for any flaw other than the unlit garage. There was no light upstairs. Perhaps there should have been, perhaps not. Usually Fiona would be having her bath by now, but only darkness there. That was another cautionary factor.
Over the years Howard Rennie had been to enough full-dress police funerals to wonder how it could happen to himself. There was only one way. The epitaphs of the dead men were clear enough. Carelessness. Somewhere, for some time, usually minuscule, they had slackened. Not all, but most, grew overconfident and fell into the convenience of routine, began to believe in their own safety. A few were killed in closely-planned attacks, but most as Rennie knew well presented themselves as casual targets.
This was why he had a light fitted for the garage that should now be on, and why he noticed it was not lit.
His wife was a meticulous and careful person. Not one to make a silly mistake about the garage. It was the dilemma of the life they led that he wondered constantly how far as a family they should take their personal security. On the one hand there could be something drastically wrong that had prevented his wife from switching on a light as agreed. On the other she could be next door for sugar or milk, and stayed to gossip while the children played or watched television.
But it was quite out of character for her to forget.
He eased out of the car, pushing the door to but not engaging the lock, and reached for the PPK Walther in his shoulder holster. He had loaded and checked it before starting his drive home from Castlereagh, but he again looked for the safety-catch mechanism to see it was in the ‘on’ position. On the balls of his feet he went towards the front gate. The gate was wrought-iron and had never hung well — it rattled and needed a lifting, forcing movement to open it. Rennie instead went to the far side of the gatepost before the hedge thickened, through a gap, past the roses and onto the grass. The run up to the front door was gravel and he kept to the grass, fearful of any noise his feet might make. Though the window showed the light from inside, the gap between the curtains was not enough for him to see through.
There were no voices at the moment he reached the window, just the hymn-singing on the television. Rennie came off the grass and stepped onto the tiled step of the doorway. The Walther was in his right hand, as with the left he found his Yale key and inserted it gently into the opening. Steady now, boy. This is the crucial time. If you’re noisy now it’s blown — if there’s anything to blow. For a moment he felt sheepish at the stupidity of tiptoeing across his own front lawn. Had the neighbours seen? The door opened, just enough to get him inside. To the lounge door. It was off the latch, and the aperture of an inch or so acted as a funnel to the final crescendo of the programme, and the choir’s lusty singing. As the sound tailed away he heard his wife speak. ‘Great hero, aren’t you? With your bloody rifle. Need it to make a man of you…’