funny farm,’ my father said, ‘those first few months in town. He said he was going barmy until you turned up.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Apparently you cheered him up no end. Turned the lights back on was the phrase he used.’ He smiled again. ‘That sound like the Rory you know?’
I nodded, watching the steaming plate of crumble, glad of the interruption. ‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for my spoon, ‘it does.’
In Belfast, after a brief spell in barracks, I moved into a rented flat off the Ormeau Road. No one ever bothered me with anything as formal as a job description and after a couple of months I realized why. At some exalted level, my bosses had decided to push for something called ‘primacy’ in UK mainland dealings with the Provisional IRA. Primacy meant MI5 taking a lead in the war against the terrorists. If the plan worked, then the police would be the losers, and my bosses – never ones to underestimate a challenge – had accordingly dug themselves in for a long struggle.
To make a credible case in Whitehall, they had to argue from a position of strength. They had to know a great deal about the Provos. They had to fatten their intelligence files, improve their strike rate and demonstrate to the Home Office that their knowledge of the enemy was second to none. That meant extra assets on the ground, agents who would bed down in Belfast, touching base occasionally with the RUC, with Army Intelligence and with MI6. Most of all, it meant building a stable of informants, menand women from deep within the Republican command structures, people whom, for one reason or another, you’d turn and nourish and put to good account. The latter job, amongst one or two others, was mine.
The logic wasn’t difficult to follow. I had youth on my side. I had the right academic background. And some judicious arm-twisting gave me credible cover as a research student at Queen’s University. The fact that I was single entitled me to a half-decent social life, and from my bosses’ point of view I thus acquired the most precious asset of all: I could plausibly mix in most company.
It was a strange life, me and my other self, and if I felt anything at all it was a kind of lingering guilt at enjoying it so much. Raw intelligence is a commodity unlike any other. It doesn’t respond to fixed hours and a five-day week. You can’t manufacture it on an assembly line, behind a set of factory gates. On the contrary, the best bits are often wholly unpredictable, big juicy windfalls that drop off the tree without the faintest stir of breeze, a phone call or a meeting or a note through the door that seems, at the time, pure chance. In reality, of course, that’s not the case at all. Nothing happens without months of careful preparation, of friendships carefully nurtured, of pressures oh-so-subtly applied, of dance steps so intricate and so deft that it’s hard, often, to even be aware of the music. But the music is there, and as time goes by it becomes slowly but unmistakably addictive.
‘Off-duty’ isn’t a meaningful word in this context because it never happens, but there were times when the sheer beauty of the place very nearly got the better of me. I used to go to the Republic a lot, trips south over the border. Most of these excursions took me no further than Dundalk or Donegal, places of considerable interest to people like us, but occasionally I could justify going way down, past Dublin, across the Midlands, to the wild, empty coasts of Kerry and Galway. These were landscapes I’d never seen in my life, the mountains shouldering down to the sea, the weather ever-changing, the fine soft drizzle drifting in from the Atlantic, the abrupt squalls of wind, the heaving ocean puddled a sudden, brilliant blue. I loved it, the taste of it, the smell of the peat fires, the curls of smoke around the tiny cottages, the dogs chained to the milk urns, the way the hill farmers worked their stony fields, their jackets buttoned tight
‘Really?’
‘Yes. Apparently you cheered him up no end. Turned the lights back on was the phrase he used.’ He smiled again. ‘That sound like the Rory you know?’
I nodded, watching the steaming plate of crumble, glad of the interruption. ‘Yes,’ I said, reaching for my spoon, ‘it does.’
In Belfast, after a brief spell in barracks, I moved into a rented flat off the Ormeau Road. No one ever bothered me with anything as formal as a job description and after a couple of months I realized why. At some exalted level, my bosses had decided to push for something called ‘primacy’ in UK mainland dealings with the Provisional IRA. Primacy meant MI5 taking a lead in the war against the terrorists. If the plan worked, then the police would be the losers, and my bosses – never ones to underestimate a challenge – had accordingly dug themselves in for a long struggle.
To make a credible case in Whitehall, they had to argue from a position of strength. They had to know a great deal about the Provos. They had to fatten their intelligence files, improve their strike rate and demonstrate to the Home Office that their knowledge of the enemy was second to none. That meant extra assets on the ground, agents who would bed down in Belfast, touching base occasionally with the RUC, with Army Intelligence and with MI6. Most of all, it meant building a stable of informants, menand women from deep within the Republican command structures, people whom, for one reason or another, you’d turn and nourish and put to good account. The latter job, amongst one or two others, was mine.
The logic wasn’t difficult to follow. I had youth on my side. I had the right academic background. And some judicious arm-twisting gave me credible cover as a research student at Queen’s University. The fact that I was single entitled me to a half-decent social life, and from my bosses’ point of view I thus acquired the most precious asset of all: I could plausibly mix in most company.
It was a strange life, me and my other self, and if I felt anything at all it was a kind of lingering guilt at enjoying it so much. Raw intelligence is a commodity unlike any other. It doesn’t respond to fixed hours and a five-day week. You can’t manufacture it on an assembly line, behind a set of factory gates. On the contrary, the best bits are often wholly unpredictable, big juicy windfalls that drop off the tree without the faintest stir of breeze, a phone call or a meeting or a note through the door that seems, at the time, pure chance. In reality, of course, that’s not the case at all. Nothing happens without months of careful preparation, of friendships carefully nurtured, of pressures oh-so-subtly applied, of dance steps so intricate and so deft that it’s hard, often, to even be aware of the music. But the music is there, and as time goes by it becomes slowly but unmistakably addictive.
‘Off-duty’ isn’t a meaningful word in this context because it never happens, but there were times when the sheer beauty of the place very nearly got the better of me. I used to go to the Republic a lot, trips south over the border. Most of these excursions took me no further than Dundalk or Donegal, places of considerable interest to people like us, but occasionally I could justify going way down, past Dublin, across the Midlands, to the wild, empty coasts of Kerry and Galway. These were landscapes I’d never seen in my life, the mountains shouldering down to the sea, the weather ever-changing, the fine soft drizzle drifting in from the Atlantic, the abrupt squalls of wind, the heaving ocean puddled a sudden, brilliant blue. I loved it, the taste of it, the smell of the peat fires, the curls of smoke around the tiny cottages, the dogs chained to the milk urns, the way the hill farmers worked their stony fields, their jackets buttoned tight
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