A Darker Place

He could have left the army, but found that he didn’t want to, and when he tried to get his mother her own place, it turned out she was perfectly happy where she was. It had also become apparent that the perils of bomb disposal were beyond her understanding, so he settled a hundred thousand pounds on her, and the same on his wife, and left them to the joys of the countryside.

Before the Portland Hotel, he had been decorated with the Military Cross for gallantry, although the events surrounding it had only a tenuous link with his ordinary duties.

On standby, he had been based in a small market town in County Down where there had been a spate of bomb alerts, mostly false, though one in four was the real thing. The unit had five jeeps, a driver and guard and a disposal expert. On that particular day, a call came in over the radio, and the jeeps disappeared, leaving only Roper and his driver, the unit being a man short. The first call was false, also the second. There was another, this time for Roper by name. There was something about it, the speaker had a cockney accent that sounded wrong.

Terry, his driver, started up, and Roper said, ‘No, just hang on. I’m not happy. Something smells.’ He had a Browning Hi-Power pistol stuffed in his camouflage blouse. He was also wearing, courtesy of his newfound wealth, a nylon and titanium vest capable of stopping a .44 Magnum at point-blank range.

Terry eased up an Uzi machine pistol on his knees. There was a nurses’ hostel to the side of the old folks’ home across the street and as the voice sounded over the radio again, still calling for Roper, a milk wagon came round the corner. It braked to a halt outside the hostel. Two men were in the cab in dairy company uniform.

The one on the passenger side dropped out, turning suddenly as Roper started forward, pulled out a pistol and fired. He was good, the bullet striking Roper in the chest and knocking him back against the jeep. The man fired again, catching Terry in the shoulder as he scrambled out with the Uzi, then fired again at Roper as he tried to get up, catching him in the left arm before turning and starting to run. Roper shot him twice in the back, shattering his spine.

The vest had performed perfectly. He picked up the Uzi Terry had dropped, got to his feet and walked towards the milk truck. The driver had slipped from behind the wheel and was firing through the cab where the passenger door was partially open. A bullet plucked Roper’s shoulder. He dropped down on his face and could see directly under the truck where the driver’s legs were exposed from the knees down. He held the Uzi out in front of him and fired two sustained bursts, the man screaming in agony and falling back against the hostel wall.

Roper found him there, sobbing. He tapped the muzzle of the Uzi against the man’s face. ‘Where is it, in the cab?’

‘Yes,’ the man groaned.

‘What kind? Pencil timer, detonators or what?’

‘Go fuck yourself.’

‘Have it your own way. We’ll go to hell together.’

He grimaced at the pain of his wounded arm, but managed to pull the man up and push him half into the cab. There was a large Crawford’s biscuit tin. ‘You could get a Christmas cake in there or a hell of a lot of Semtex. Anyway, let’s try again. Pencil timer, detonator?’

He turned the man’s face and pushed the muzzle of the Uzi between his lips. The man wriggled and jerked away. ‘Pencils.’

‘Let’s hope you’re right, for both our sakes.’

He pulled off the lid and exposed the contents. Three pencils – the extras just to make sure. ‘Oh, dear,’ he said. ‘Fifteen minutes. I’d better move sharpish.’ He pulled them out and tossed them away and eased the man down as he fainted.

People were emerging from the houses and the local bar, now a couple of dogs barked, and then there was a sudden roaring of engines as two jeeps appeared, moving fast.

‘Here we go, the bloody cavalry arriving late as usual.’ He slid down on the pavement, his back to the hostel wall, scrabbled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, fumbled to get one out, and failed.

It didn’t make him notable in any way beyond military circles. The national newspapers didn’t make a fuss simply because death and destruction were so much a part of everyday life in Northern Ireland that, as the old army saying went, it was old news before it was news. But the Portland Hotel a year later, the lone man face-to-face with a terrible death for nine hours, really was news, even before the decision had been taken to reward him with the George Cross. He’d continued to meet the daily demands of his calling, working out of an old state school in Byron Road which the army had taken over on the safe-house principle, fortifying it against any kind of attack, the many rooms providing accommodation for officers and men, with a bar and catering facilities. There were places like it all over Belfast, safe, but bleak.

Local women fought for the privilege of working there in the canteen, the laundry or as cleaners. That many would be Republican sympathizers was clear, and a rough and ready way of sorting the problem was to try to employ only Protestant women. On the other hand, it was obviously a temptation for Catholics who needed work to pretend to be other than they were. Such women lived locally, and came and went through the heavily-fortified gates with identity cards, often so false they could be bought for a couple of pounds in any local bar.

Roper had been posted to Byron Street for nine months, and in that time had caused something of a stir with his Military Cross and good looks, but his gentlemanly behaviour towards the younger women, which was conspicuously absent in his fellows, had provoked a suggestion that, as the local girls put it, there had to be something wrong with him.

On the other hand, his incredible bravery was a fact, and so was the fact that in those nine months, some of his comrades had paid the final price and others had been terribly injured.

The Portland Hotel caused many people to look at him differently, as if there was something otherworldly about him, and there were those who felt uncomfortable in his presence, hurrying past him. One who did not was a new young cleaner who replaced an older woman who’d moved away. The girl’s name was Jean Murray and she was from a Protestant Orange background.

Roper’s room was on her list and she was resolutely cheerful from the moment she started and knew all his business within two days. Her mother had been killed in a bombing four years earlier, for which she blamed the fugging Fenians, as she called them. Her father was a member of the local Orange Lodge and had a plum job at the Port Authority. There was also a brother of twenty-one named Kenny in his final year at Queens University.

She extracted as much personal information from Roper as she could. As long as it wasn’t military, he didn’t mind. The truth was that to a certain extent he rather fancied her, which gave him pause for thought, because it meant the defensive wall he’d built around himself was weakening.

‘What’s it get yer, Captain, the hero bit? You’re a lonely man, that’s the truth of it, and you’ve stared death in the face for so long, it’s dried up any juice that’s in you.’

‘Well, thank you, Dr Freud,’ he said. ‘I mean, you would know.’

‘Why do you do it? It’s a known fact in this dump that you’re well fixed financially.’

‘Okay, look at it this way. When the Troubles started in sixty-nine, the bomb thing was in its infancy. Very crude, no big deal. Over the years, as the Provisional IRA has grown in power, bombs have become very sophisticated indeed. The public image of the IRA as a bunch of shaven-headed yobs off a building site is well off the mark. Plenty of solid middle-class professionals are in the movement. Schoolteachers, lawyers, accountants, a whole range of ordinary people.’

‘So what are you saying?’

‘That the bombmakers these days have got university degrees and they’re very clever and sophisticated. Consider the Portland bomb. I’m an expert and I’ve dealt with hundreds of bombs over the years, but that one took me nine hours, and shall I tell you something? He’ll be back, that bombmaker. He’ll come with something just a little bit different, just for me. He can’t afford to have me beat him. It’s as simple as that.’

She stared at him, pretty and rumpled in her blue uniform dress, leaning on her broom, no makeup on at all, and there was something in her eyes that could have been pity.

‘That’s terrible, what you say. Still, it can’t go on, things change.’

‘What do you mean things change?’

‘The whole system. My Kenny says the bombs won’t need people like you soon. He’s read about you in the papers. He knows I work for you.’

‘What does he mean things change?’

‘He’s taking his finals in his degree soon. Electronics. He makes gadgets. These days you have a hand control to work your television, open your garage doors, unlock your car, switch on security systems in your house. We’ve only got an ordinary terrace, but the gadgets he’s created in it are brilliant.’

‘Very interesting, but what’s this got to do with bombs?’

‘Well, it’s too technical for me, but he’s been working on a thing he calls a Howler. It looks like a standard television control, but it’s really different. He can turn off security systems, and I mean really important ones. He demonstrated on our local bank. He kept locking the doors as we walked past. They didn’t know whether they were coming or going. Does it to people’s cars as we go by, turns on store alarms, even big shops in town.’

‘Very interesting,’ Roper said. ‘Fascinating, but I still don’t see the relevance to bombs.’

‘Well, that’s what he’s really been working on. He said he can maybe adapt the Howler so that even a big sophisticated bomb like your Portland Hotel job could simply be switched off. That’s the only way I can describe it.’ She smiled. ‘Anyway, I can’t stand around here chattering. I’ve got five other rooms to do.’

‘No, just a minute,’ Roper said. ‘Let me get this straight. Has Kenny really got anywhere with his invention?’

‘He’s working at it all the time at the moment. He was talking about bombs at the time because of that Paradise Street bomb the day before yesterday, the one in the car that killed the sergeant. He said the Howler could have switched it off at the touch of a button, that was what he was working towards.’

Roper was cold with excitement. ‘He said that, did he?’

She laughed. ‘I said could it work the other way, could what was switched off be switched on? He said a Howler has two faces. What could be switched off could be switched on again.’ She picked up her bucket. ‘Anyway, I’ll be away now. Work to do.’

‘Just one more thing. Could I meet Kenny?’

She had moved to the door and turned. ‘I don’t know about that. I mean, soldiers are targets at the best of times and you never know who’s who these days. Fenians everywhere.’

‘I wouldn’t be in uniform, Jean. I’d just like to meet him and discuss his work if he’d let me. It sounds very interesting. And he might find it rewarding to discuss his ideas with someone like me who has spent so much time at the coalface, so to speak.’

She looked serious. ‘You’ve got a point. I can’t speak for him, but I’ll give him a phone call, see what he has to say. I’ve got to get moving. I’ll let you know.’

She was away and Roper sat on the bed and thought about it. It wasn’t as crazy as it sounded. Most really sophisticated bombs had multiple electrical circuits of one kind or another, intertwining in complicated puzzles, feeding into each other, often in the most bizarre way. The theory behind this Howler device of Kenny’s was a kind of Holy Grail. After all, if the most complicated of security systems could be neutered at the touch of a button, it seemed logical that the right touch of genius could do the same thing to bomb circuits.