“Where is this place?”
“Dungiven Street. Round the corner. Do you know it?”
“Aye, I know it.”
I looked at my watch. It was nearly 4 now.
“If we’re going to do this we need to do it right now. Can you be in and out in fifteen minutes? I really don’t want a confrontation.”
“I can be in and out in five.”
“That’s good. Where does your friend Siobhan live?”
“Siobhan … Oh, she’s out near Altnagelvin.”
“I know where that is, too. I can run you over.”
“I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
“It’s no trouble, it’s on my way back to Belfast. Let me call home first.” I put fifty pence in the bar phone and called home.
Janette Campbell was over babysitting. “Hello?” Janette said.
“Janette, it’s Sean, there shouldn’t be any hassles but I may be a wee bit delayed in Derry. Can you tell Beth?”
“You’re in Derry and might be delayed. Is that the message?”
“Yeah. I should be home on time, but you never know.”
“OK, Sean.”
I hung up and walked back over to Mary. “Come on, love, let’s get this show on the road before your husband gets back.”
“He’s not my husband. I wouldn’t marry the likes of him. Just my boyfriend. Ex-boyfriend.”
We walked out to the Beemer. I pretended to drop my lighter and looked underneath it for bombs. No bombs. We drove out to Dungiven Street. Quiet little residential block of redbrick back to backs. We walked to the front door and she gingerly took out her key and put it in the lock. She turned the key and leaned in the doorway with a whispered “Nate? Nate?”
She turned to me “No Nate,” she said.
I looked at my watch again. “Fifteen minutes, mind. It’ll be better for all of us if he never knew you were here.”
I followed her into the hall.
They did it very professionally indeed.
A man was waiting behind the door with a sawn-off shotgun. Another man came out of the side room with a pistol. Both men were wearing balaclavas. Both guns were pointing only at me. Mary walked along the hall, into the kitchen and straight out the back door of the house without turning her head once to look at me.
“Don’t move,” the man with the pistol said. “When we tell you to, we want you to lie down on the floor.”
There was no play that wouldn’t result in my immediate death. I put my hands up and when ordered to I lay down on the floor with my hands behind my back.
They stripped me of my weapon.
They handcuffed me and took my wallet and the knife in my sock.
Classic honey trap. Oh Duffy. Eejits fell for honey traps, not you. Not an experienced peeler like you.
15: THAT PETROL EMOTION
Things are different in the movies. When the IRA take a policeman or a soldier hostage in the pictures what follows is an often philosophical and historical argument about the British presence in Ireland and the crimes the Brits have committed against Irish rebels. In real life what happened was what had happened to the two corporals in West Belfast: the hostage is stripped and beaten and then summarily executed. There’s no philosophy, no history, just a savage beating and then a bullet in the brain.
If the IRA want specific intelligence from the hostage then there will, of course, be graphic physical torture until the victim tells them everything he or she knows. Hundreds of tortured victims had been found over the years lying by the side of the road or buried in shallow graves.
I had seen bodies where the paramilitaries had drilled into victims’ kneecaps, wrists and ankles. I’d seen bodies where the eyeballs had been gouged out, where the victim’s feet had been blowtorched, or where the victim had been castrated and forced to eat their own genitalia until they’d choked to death. None of this was necessary. That initial blow torch to the feet would make anyone talk. The rest was just for the sadistic pleasure of the torturers.
I knew all this and I knew there was absolutely no point trying to lie.
Truth right from the start, that was the way to go.
It wouldn’t stop them hurting me. It wouldn’t stop me from being terrified but it was a tactic and in a situation like that you need to cling to something. I decided to cling to truth.
A hood was thrown over my head and I was bundled outside to a waiting car. I was chucked in the boot and driven a short distance.
Taken out, dragged to a house and sat on a chair in the middle of a room with several people already in it. I could hear a petrol can being sloshed around in the background. Dousing someone in petrol and threatening to burn them alive was another old torturers’ trick. I didn’t want that, either.
“There’s no need for the petrol or anything else. I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” I said.
“OK. What’s your name?” a voice asked.
“Sean Duffy of Carrickfergus RUC.”
“So you’re admitting that you’re a policeman then?”
“I am.”
Grumbling and muttering from those assembled in the room. He’s admitted he’s a peeler: what else needs to be said?