Controlled Explosions by Claire McGowan Page B

further away than Belfast. Further than Dublin too. Maybe she’d go as far away as she could. Maybe she’d just keep running until it wasn’t possible to find her way back.
    ‘What’ve you now? I’ve Statistics, FUN.’
    ‘Eh … I’ve a free.’
    ‘Lucky. See you on the bus then.’
    ‘Yeah. See ya.’
    Saoirse had a normal life. She had both her parents, she had three brothers and two sisters. On Sundays they sat in a little row in Mass, all of them going up to Communion with clean faces and crossed hands. Paula, she had … well, nothing.
    ‘We put him inside. Didn’t we?’
    Detective Inspector Alec Johnson stared round the table. No one answered. He glared at the man furthest from him, who was tipped back in his chair, shirtsleeves rolled up. ‘Patrick. It was you made the arrest.’
    PJ Maguire didn’t like being called by his first name, Bob knew. Couldn’t blame him. If your name was Patrick, you may as well wear a T-shirt saying ‘I’m a Taig, please set fire to my house’. ‘Aye, sir, it was. Red Hugh’s in the Maze and he hasn’t put a foot outside it in three years. That’s a fact.’
    ‘So why are we still finding his signature bombs all over the routes of Orange Order parades?’ Johnson slapped the paper down on the table. It was the analysis of the device from earlier that day, the fifth they’d found that summer. A list of chemicals as long as your arm. Johnson liked to pace up and down behind you in meetings – kept you on your toes. Bob tried to concentrate. Johnson was talking. ‘See those long names? That’s fertiliser. We all know Red Hugh favoured fertiliser – he used to get subsidies for it on his farm. From the British Government. Then he put it into bombs to blow up British Army patrols.’
    ‘I doubt he appreciated the irony,’ PJ muttered. Bob stared down at the table. He could still picture the man at his trial. Mad eyes and a straggly beard like some Russian Commie – they called him Red Hugh because he’d got into the Provos via a dalliance with radical Marxism. That, and the brand of fertiliser he used leaked a red dye that was exactly the colour of blood.
    Johnson went on. ‘He uses these same detonators. He even uses this brand of copper wiring, but he’s in the Maze. So what’s going on? How is this possible?’
    No one had any answers.
    ‘Sir?’ A female voice, quiet but clear. It said –
listen to me. I’ve got as much right to speak as you.
‘Do you not think maybe someone’s taken over Red Hugh’s bomb factory?’
    Johnson looked annoyed. ‘That’s where I was going next, Miss Corry.’
    ‘It’s Detective Constable.’
    Bob looked at her from the corner of his eye, which was close enough. It wasn’t right, all that blond hair and the short skirts. This Corry girl was from Belfast and had been pushed up the ranks, though she was barely even thirty. She’d appeared in the station at the start of parade season, after they’d found the first bomb. They didn’t even have a vacancy but there she was. And she had a baby, he’d heard. Who was looking after it while she was sitting here telling her elders what to do? Bob had been still on traffic at that age. Of course, things were different then.
    Bob had started at the station in 1968, on the same day as Alec Johnson, and Sergeant Ian Robinson had trained them both, showed them how to survive, how to look for car bombs, how to vary your route to work, how to get answers out of some cocky wee IRA shite with a balaclava in his back pocket and a bent lawyer on speed-dial. Until the day Robinson forgot his own rules, and started his BMW in the car park.
    They’d heard the bang three storeys up. Cups fell off tables and shattered. The windows bubbled in. Bob had frozen, tea soaking into his shirt and blood on his fingers from trying to catch the broken mug.
    Blood. There’d been a lot more of it on the lower windows of the station. They’d had to get in a wee man with a squeegee, who did the job