Ryan moved out into the street again, recognizing that he was dazed, unsteady — the situation overwhelming him — and passed the ruined store. Something like butane gas or paraffin exploded at the rear of the store, and flame gushed into the sky, smoke boiling out in pursuit of it. There were few people moving on the street — a lot of bodies, but few people moving. The bus was empty of passengers, or their bodies had slid down below the level of the window-frames. He crunched on through the glass.
He stood beside an open Mercedes that had halted against a streetlamp, and saw people begin to emerge, slowly as into an altered world, from the cafe. Ryan saw at the edge of his vision a child nestling in an imitation-death in the back seat of the Mercedes. Her mother's head was in an impossible position, her body only kept upright by the seatbelt. Glass from across the street had almost decapitated the woman. But he could not understand the child's stillness until he saw the dribble of blood from the back of her head winding slowly round her neck, reaching like a small pet snake into her blouse. He thought the child might still be alive, only stunned, and that made him more angry. He felt the emotion boiling through him, wave after wave; more accurately like a kettle continuing to boil because it could not be switched off or removed from the heat.
He saw McBride mistily, staring around him at the carnage, as the first police cars screamed to a standstill only yards away. The lights of an ambulance flickered up the street, and the wail of the fire-appliances impinged on him. But McBride was the focus of his attention. The woman was hurrying him away, towards the car park where McBride's hire car had been left. Ryan went after them, everything narrowed down to the figures of McBride and the woman. Ryan patted the gun in his shoulder holster. He knew he was acting under stress, that rationality had dissipated in the flood of emotion, but the overriding irrationality of the explosion and the deaths — which might total more than a hundred if the store had been crowded — possessed him. If the IRA could get hold of McBride, if they knew what he knew—
Anger fused the circuitry there, the identification of McBride and the perpetrators of the atrocity. He saw McBride turn into the entrance of the multi-storey car park, and hurried across the street after him. His knee pained him. He must have bruised it without realizing, perhaps against the bodywork of the silver-grey Mercedes.
The images of the car brought a nauseous bile to the back of his throat as he went up the first flight of the musty-smelling concrete steps. He paused, hearing footsteps above him, then the sighing open and shut again of a door. Next level. He hobbled up the steps, holding onto the iron rail, pausing while an elderly couple negotiated the turn in the stairs, squeezed past him, walking-sticks and old thin legs suddenly untrustworthy, betraying. A shopping-basket on wheels bounced down each step behind them, hurrying them rather than under their control.
AIDS rules — OK? sprayed in blue paint on the grey wall, and the CND symbol. MUFC, followed by the comment are cunts. Clapton is God as he went on up the steps, then in red above Gloria does and What? and takes 14 inches, the letters that blinded him, caused him to pause, clench his fists, reach for the 9mm Sig-Sauer P230 and feel the comfort of the butt — Provos, and IRA rules. A mindless youth with a spray-can, non-political, half-literate, meaning nothing.
And the dead in the street, the glass like a flung-down beach, the perspective changed, the town changed.
He heard as he opened the door a car engine fire, and without thought he yelled McBride's name with all the force of his lungs and throat. Red lights flicked on. The Nissan was backing out from behind a concrete pillar, and he could see the woman in the passenger seat. He ran towards the car, yelling for McBride to stop, the Sig-Sauer in his hand now, but not levelled. The woman was in the way. The Nissan had stopped, and he ran round to the driver's window. McBride was already winding it down. The man's face looked dazed and innocent, and infuriated Ryan. He raised the gun—
The woman had removed the small Astra 300 from her shoulder-bag, pointed it quickly, and fired twice into Ryan's face. He felt each of the bullets, sensed flesh opening and dissolving round the lead, sensed teeth being smashed, almost the exit of each bullet as his head lifted away from the car and he saw the grey concrete roof above him become fuzzy and unformed and dark.
By nightfall they had reached the outskirts of Skibbereen without further contact with the pursuit. A cottage just on the edge of the village provided food and water — cheese and rough-hewn bread sticking to their palates, washed off and down into empty stomachs by the water. McBride knew the cottager, a slight acquaintance which would not prevent the old man answering any questions put to him by their pursuers. To prevent any useless bravery, he gave the man permission to answer any questions — time, condition, even direction.
They left the cottage under a cloudy night sky that suggested a moonlit night to come. The rain had petered out before darkness. McBride took them half a mile north of the village, up the bank of the River Hen, then doubled back, skirting Skibbereen to the west and taking footpaths and bridleways through the easy farming country to the southwest of the village. The moon emerged from the last rags of cloud around ten o" clock, and the landscape was lumpy with clumps of trees and small copses, horizoned by hedges, rendered amusing and safe by the occasional disturbed lumps of sleeping cattle.
They left the lights of a hamlet behind them, navigating by the bulk of Lick Hill a mile or so ahead of them, black and humped against the stars. They walked close together as if to re-establish some community that had been lost in the grey daylight. McBride walked with his arm round Maureen, and she held Gilliatt's hand on her other side.
McBride was heading for a farm that lay snugly beneath Lick Hill, where they could sleep an undisturbed sleep in one of the barns. The farmer would know nothing of their presence. At least, that was how McBride envisaged it. Holding the farmer hostage at gunpoint might become necessary if they were disturbed, but in that event there was nothing to consider. Guns required no forward planning.
Gilliatt heard the approaching planes first — the higher, lighter feminine note of the fighter escort above the deeper rumbling of the three-engined Junkers Ju52s. The Messerschmitts he knew by sound, the other aircraft he only recognized from their blacker silhouettes against the stars when they were almost overhead. All three of them stood, heads upraised as if in supplication or wonder, immobile as the lumbering Junkers laid strings of blooming white eggs from their bellies and the paratroopers — the Fallschirmjaeger — swung and straightened and descended all round them. A stream of blown dandelion clocks, closing on them, dropping into the fields on every side of them. Hundreds of them.