against the wind,one finger raised, a passing salute. Sometimes alone, sometimes not, I marvelled at it all, brief interludes, simple pleasures, buried in an otherwise complicated life.
Throughout my time in Belfast, I kept one eye on the newspapers, thinking more often than not about Beth Alloway. The Iran-Iraq War had finally come to an end and there was a flurry of press speculation about arms and related sales in its aftermath. As far as I knew, the embargo still applied, but the reports about sanctions-busting UK firms never made the front page, and if I thought anything at all, it was strictly in connection with Beth.
Once, and once only, I tried to talk to her on the phone. She answered almost at once, a flat, worn voice, a child crying in the background, and after a brief series of awkward pleasantries, I knew that the conversation was going nowhere. She wasn’t pleased to hear from me. Her husband was ‘away’. Life, to no one’s surprise, was going on much as before. After a minute or so, I apologized for interrupting her from whatever she’d been doing, knowing that the gap between our separate worlds was probably unbridgeable. Sympathy, alas, wasn’t enough. All Beth Alloway wanted was her privacy. That, and some vestige of the life that we, and the Iraqis, had taken away from her.
My life in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt halt one December night in 1989. A complicated set of events had taken me west, across the province, to a modern hotel on the banks of the River Foyle a couple of miles downstream from Londonderry. There I was to meet a young Catholic businessman called Padraig MacElwaine. He ran a local chain of builder’s merchants. Like everyone else in the construction business, he paid a sizeable monthly sum to the local IRA godfathers, but his eldest son had recently been beaten up in a carefully laid ambush in the city centre, and gruff Provo regrets about mistaken identity had done nothing to temper his rage. Evidently, the man was incandescent. He had debts to settle. He had names to impart, information to pass on and – most important of all – he said he was in a position to make an informed guess or two about what we in Five always referred to as ‘forthcoming attractions’.
This kind of intelligence was exactly the collateral that my bosses needed to make their case in Whitehall. I was therefore ordered to Londonderry post-haste for a rendezvous at the riversidehotel. I was to pose as a visiting businesswoman from the UK, order a drink in the bar and await developments. The hotel was way off the local Provo circuit – too classy, too expensive – and I was assured that the usual cover arrangements, unspecified, would be in place.
I drove to Londonderry. By the time I found the hotel, it had been dark for nearly three hours. I parked outside reception in a well-lit bay and left a spare key on top of the front wheel. The meet in the bar went according to plan. Padraig turned out to be a beefy, thick-set man with tight curly black hair and a shirt collar one size too small for his neck. He was attentive and courteous and made a beautiful job of picking me up.
After the meal, we were to adjourn to Padraig’s room. There he’d give me chapter and verse: names, addresses, dates, forthcoming attractions, the kind of priceless operational data that I’d haul back to Belfast for onward transmission to London. That’s what the plan said. That’s what I expected. Instead, Padraig leaned forward over the table, slightly comical, the corner of his mouth blobbed with cream from the second helping of cheesecake.
‘I haven’t got a room,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘They’re full.’
I laughed, offering him a napkin. He wiped his mouth with it, reddening with embarrassment. I was still laughing.
‘Good job you’re not for real,’ I said. ‘What kind of pick-up would this be?’
He shrugged, scarlet now. We’d already established he had a wife and four kids. He clearly
Throughout my time in Belfast, I kept one eye on the newspapers, thinking more often than not about Beth Alloway. The Iran-Iraq War had finally come to an end and there was a flurry of press speculation about arms and related sales in its aftermath. As far as I knew, the embargo still applied, but the reports about sanctions-busting UK firms never made the front page, and if I thought anything at all, it was strictly in connection with Beth.
Once, and once only, I tried to talk to her on the phone. She answered almost at once, a flat, worn voice, a child crying in the background, and after a brief series of awkward pleasantries, I knew that the conversation was going nowhere. She wasn’t pleased to hear from me. Her husband was ‘away’. Life, to no one’s surprise, was going on much as before. After a minute or so, I apologized for interrupting her from whatever she’d been doing, knowing that the gap between our separate worlds was probably unbridgeable. Sympathy, alas, wasn’t enough. All Beth Alloway wanted was her privacy. That, and some vestige of the life that we, and the Iraqis, had taken away from her.
My life in Northern Ireland came to an abrupt halt one December night in 1989. A complicated set of events had taken me west, across the province, to a modern hotel on the banks of the River Foyle a couple of miles downstream from Londonderry. There I was to meet a young Catholic businessman called Padraig MacElwaine. He ran a local chain of builder’s merchants. Like everyone else in the construction business, he paid a sizeable monthly sum to the local IRA godfathers, but his eldest son had recently been beaten up in a carefully laid ambush in the city centre, and gruff Provo regrets about mistaken identity had done nothing to temper his rage. Evidently, the man was incandescent. He had debts to settle. He had names to impart, information to pass on and – most important of all – he said he was in a position to make an informed guess or two about what we in Five always referred to as ‘forthcoming attractions’.
This kind of intelligence was exactly the collateral that my bosses needed to make their case in Whitehall. I was therefore ordered to Londonderry post-haste for a rendezvous at the riversidehotel. I was to pose as a visiting businesswoman from the UK, order a drink in the bar and await developments. The hotel was way off the local Provo circuit – too classy, too expensive – and I was assured that the usual cover arrangements, unspecified, would be in place.
I drove to Londonderry. By the time I found the hotel, it had been dark for nearly three hours. I parked outside reception in a well-lit bay and left a spare key on top of the front wheel. The meet in the bar went according to plan. Padraig turned out to be a beefy, thick-set man with tight curly black hair and a shirt collar one size too small for his neck. He was attentive and courteous and made a beautiful job of picking me up.
After the meal, we were to adjourn to Padraig’s room. There he’d give me chapter and verse: names, addresses, dates, forthcoming attractions, the kind of priceless operational data that I’d haul back to Belfast for onward transmission to London. That’s what the plan said. That’s what I expected. Instead, Padraig leaned forward over the table, slightly comical, the corner of his mouth blobbed with cream from the second helping of cheesecake.
‘I haven’t got a room,’ he said.
‘Why not?’
‘They’re full.’
I laughed, offering him a napkin. He wiped his mouth with it, reddening with embarrassment. I was still laughing.
‘Good job you’re not for real,’ I said. ‘What kind of pick-up would this be?’
He shrugged, scarlet now. We’d already established he had a wife and four kids. He clearly
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