James Benn - Evil for evil

In 1921, shortly after the birth of their new child, Polly and her husband were caught in a cross fire on a Dublin street between the IRA and the Royal Irish Constabulary. Both were killed. Not an uncommon event, unfortunately. I wondered what share of the hatred Red Jack carried came from the losses he endured in the first two decades of his life.

There were blank spaces in the chronological record before his service in the Spanish Civil War. After his return, minus most of the men he'd brought with him to fight in the Republican Brigade, he recovered from his physical wounds and drank his way through his emotional ones. He married and cleaned himself up. His wife had twins, and he obtained his position with the Irish Hospitals' Sweepstake. The report noted matter-of-factly that the sweepstake tickets sold in the U.S. provided a conduit for funds to be channeled back to the IRA, as Clan na Gael added significant sums to wire transfers as well as to the hard cash delivered across the Atlantic. Jack Taggart seemed to have been tamed by his marriage and his nearly legitimate job.

In early 1941, he dropped out of sight. His wife and two children no longer lived in Dublin, and the file showed no trace of their whereabouts. There were no surveillance photos. All the good stuff was hidden away. I figured that's when the IRA chief of staff sent him to Ulster to work with the IRA Northern Command. Maybe he brought his family with him, under an assumed name. Or perhaps they'd moved to one of the border counties, so he could slip across for a visit when things got too hot in Ulster. Wherever his family was, it must have been before the IRA chief of staff found out Red Jack had been cooking the books.

Two years later, Eddie Mahoney is sent north to set things right, and nothing works out the way anyone planned. Slaine O'Brien hobnobs with the likes of Jenkins and Taggart at the same time she's trying to keep a lid on sectarian violence. Mahoney is just doing his job, and before he can finish his Agatha Christie, he's facedown in a ditch. Sam Burnham and Pete Brennan are caught up in it somehow, and they end up dead before their time.

I opened the next file, the one Major Cosgrove had assembled containing details of unsolved incidents. The most recent was the murder of the RUC constable in Dromara. DI Carrick had just come from his funeral when I first met him. Four shots in the back, almost on his doorstep. Attributed to the IRA. No suspects.

A week before, the body of a Protestant member of the Ulster Volunteer Force-not that there were any Catholic members-was found on the outskirts of Castlereagh, just to the east of Belfast. A hood was tied over his head and he'd been shot twice in the heart. The report mentioned that he was thought to have split off from the Red Hand, dissatisfied with what he considered to be a lukewarm response to Republican violence. No suspects.

A garage had blown up in Shankill, the Catholic neighborhood in Belfast. The body of a man, burned beyond recognition, was found along with bits and pieces of bomb-making equipment. It appeared he had been bound to a chair and left to watch his own bomb explode. No suspects.

A British soldier killed, struck by a vehicle on a deserted road. Catholic, no suspects, may or may not have been connected with sectarian violence. The reports went on and on, about evenly divided between sides, the Catholics slightly higher in the corpse count. Some were obvious targets of opportunity, in the wrong place, presenting an easy kill. Others, like the bomb maker and the UVF man, were definite extremists, killers who would have taken many more lives. I could feel sorry for the poor soldier, run down walking a country road at night. But a guy making bombs? No, that was beyond me. IRA bombs had killed too many innocent civilians during their S-Plan, and I didn't want to read about any more mothers getting blown up while pushing baby carriages to market. The same went for the UVF guy, breaking away from the Red Hand. If they were too tame for him, he would have been certain to spark another wave of reprisal killings.

There were two other killings among all the other deaths that matched these two. Dangerous, extremists both, one IRA and one Red Hand. If I eliminated those, and the deaths that were possible accidents or attributed to more personal motives, there were very few left. The constable from Dromara and a Catholic dockworker from Belfast, beaten to death, the letters IRA carved in his forehead. Maybe one was payback for the other, or maybe the whole chain of events went back to the last century.

What was important was the pattern. Bad guys with big plans on both sides were ending up dead. And Slaine O'Brien was working with both Red Jack Taggart and Andrew Jenkins. Was she running her own assassination bureau? Who would be better at getting close to Republican or Unionist extremists? Were Jenkins and Taggart killing their own or sharing information, letting each other do the dirty work for MI-5?

And most important, was that such a bad idea? I couldn't say. Nothing was as it should be here. It was not the Ireland I had expected. I shut this file.

Adrian Simms's was last. His dossier wasn't restricted and looked worn at the edges, like any cop's personnel file. I leafed through copies of his application to join the RUC, a few minor commendations, and other police forms for expenses, lost property, all the usual chickenshit paperwork law enforcement bureaucracies love. But this wasn't his official RUC file. MI-5 seemed to be keeping tabs on the RUC. There was a report on his bank records, about a year old. He had nearly two hundred pounds saved, a nice sum, but nothing that signaled payoffs. One sheet was headed "Known Associations" and listed the County Down Orange Society, which nearly every Protestant belonged to. He'd worked for Jenkins Foods Ltd. when he first moved to the area. So that's how he'd come to be so chummy with Andrew Jenkins. There were several entries about his attempt to join the Royal Black Knights. Poor Adrian. I wondered if he was surprised to find he was ineligible because he had a Catholic skeleton in his closet.

Then I saw a familiar name. McBurney, my pal the snotty Protestant bank manager. A letter to him detailed the background check the Royal Black Knights had conducted into Adrian's family history in Dublin. He had been raised from the age of two by a widowed aunt after the death of his parents. He'd been brought up as a good Protestant in the Church of Ireland. His aunt and both parents had been Protestants, as well as his grandparents on both sides. It even noted that he moved north to Ulster when he was old enough to leave the care of his aunt, in order to live and work under British rule. The letter writer-it was unsigned-concluded that Adrian Simms would be an excellent candidate, except for one thing. There was a stepbrother from an earlier marriage, and that connection, even though no fault of Adrian's, precluded his acceptance. He went on to say that copies of birth certificates and other documents would follow. McBurney had mentioned those as well, but they weren't included in this file.

It didn't say which Protestant parent had committed the youthful indiscretion. It hadn't mattered; Simms was out, and his social-climbing wife had been unhappy. I guess he'd hoped that they wouldn't dig that far back. Maybe that was the reason he went north, to escape the Holy Roman stain on his family history.

No bank records, no photos, nothing to link Adrian Simms to anything incriminating. But I did have the word of a Catholic janitor that he'd seen Simms kidnap Pete Brennan near the Northern Bank in Armagh. It would probably be the end of Micheal, or at least his job, if he spoke up against a Protestant RUC man who was friendly with Andrew Jenkins. I had to find another way. Simms was not going to escape justice. I shivered, the chill of the enclosed room seeping into my bones. I was sick at heart, wishing I didn't have to read these secret histories of betrayals, death, hate, and lost hope.