The Grand Hotel. You could hear in the name that a collapse was overdue. Nothing noble stays whole forever. Shakespearean, Dawson would say, though Dan preferred to see it as a simple daily process of decay: metal turns to rust; plant life turns to mulch; fixtures peel from walls and people have to die.
The official plan — documented and shared with those who needed to know — was that it would be Patrick, not Dan, checking in at reception. Patrick was insistent that, if things went wrong, he would take the prison time alone. The Brits would look at the long-delay timer. They’d know someone with experience had built it. They’d look to Paddy. Paddy would say he’d checked in alone, built it alone, planted it alone. Leaked Council papers could back him up. It’s not just the Brits who can leak information. Only one head would fall.
‘Then why doesn’t he check in himself?’ Dan said. ‘Why not do it in reality, instead of just on the record?’
Dawson, hearing this, had laughed. ‘What I described is what happens if it all goes tits up, Dan. If he gets caught. But we don’t want it tits up, do we? We want it all tits down.’
Patrick was a man who’d done time, a man on police files, a man masterminding a dozen other jobs right now. They couldn’t risk losing their Chief Explosives Officer to the H-Blocks — not by having him walk up to the desk and ask for a room; a simple matter of admin. What if the hotel was under surveillance? Dan’s face was unknown to the authorities. He could check the hotel was safe, report back overnight. Patrick could wander into the Grand the next day, straight up the stairs, mute, confident, a colleague coming to discuss a job, and join Dan in the room. If things ever went wrong Patrick would simply say, ‘It was me. I’m Roy Walsh. Done.’ The lie would sprawl out from there. People remember nothing of consequence. Hotels are a world within a world, a million strangers’ names.
If this seemed to Dan like a solid explanation, it still wasn’t the one he’d wanted. He wanted to hear that he’d earned the trust of the Council. The Larne — Stranraer ferry job had come off well, no civilian casualties. Three vehicles rolling in flames. Nine army men dead. A pure act of war to the extent any act of war can be that. One charge failed to do its trick, the only thing marring the op, but he was always telling them about the fucking detonators, never did understand why they didn’t seem to prize precision each time, and it was noted on the relevant files that the defect was not his fault. So: he was doing well. He wanted to hear that they’d selected him purely on merit for the important job of walking in and asking for a room, then assisting Patrick with the engineering upstairs.
‘Tell me,’ Dan said during a cold moment four weeks before, ‘are you sacrificing me? Is that it? No bullshit.’
‘Patrick has other plans,’ Dawson said. ‘Other seaside ops in the pipeline. Think we can use his face every time at every desk? No. Think I came up the Lagan in a bubble? No. He’ll be there when the important stuff’s done, and on the official version you’re clean.’
Ferry and then rail. Fewer security checks than air travel. He and Dawson drank vodka and Coke on the train down from Scotland. They sat on Brighton Beach watching seagulls walk and fly. And why was Dawson accompanying him here? Scared he didn’t have the commitment needed? Other people’s worries found a way towards your own. There was a team spirit in panic. Do I have the commitment needed? Do I really?
Schoolkids sprinting along the beach in plimsolls. Thoughts of Physical Education, the old concrete playground at his school, wearing his gutties, running around in circles in the cold, the warming smell of vulcanised rubber — a shadow of the scent you caught in class when you erased an answer from a page. When a breeze rolled in from the Channel the gulls paused to rearrange their wings. A better future. A fairer one. ‘Stand up and be counted,’ Mick liked to say. ‘Then sit down and get cunted.’
You had to remember you were at war. Catholics burned out of their homes like heretics. Occupied territory. Legislative power held back. Impose a dictatorship and call it democracy. If the average Englishman knew all that was happening in Belfast they’d cheer him on, they would, they would …
‘Before I watch you go in,’ Dawson said. ‘Before I do my dis-appearing act. Before all that, I want to make clear that we’re clear.’
‘We’re clear.’
‘Are we, though?’
‘We’re clear.’
‘One more.’
Dan sighed. These team talks were depressing. ‘We’re clear.’
A shabby man in a red jacket walked along the shore, crazy hair, chattering to himself, happy.
‘I ask for three nights. I pay cash up front. The hotel has space for me to extend my stay. They tell me my room number. I place it in the mental floor plan. I ask for another if necessary.’
‘Chess.’
‘Snooker. I’ve got no time for chess.’
‘One move and the move after that, Danny. Something unbeatable about the sound of two balls crashing together. The first good thing, don’t you think, that British Army officers invented?’
Worlds disappearing into pockets. The excitement of travel. Clean geometry, safe ballistics, each ball suspended and directed. Touch and withdraw with a thin polished cue. Resettle and aim. Dan blinked.
‘I tell the receptionist —’
‘In your nice rehearsed English accent.’
‘I tell her I’ll pay cash up front.’
‘You run an electrical business. You’ve a job at the Metropole. You didn’t want to stay there because you don’t like to mix business and pleasure. You’ve added on a weekend to breathe some fine sea air, and your father always said this hotel was the-oh-most-wonderful-place.’
‘Don’t bring him into it.’
‘You need stories in reserve, Daniel. Don’t volunteer them. Sure. But you need them there.’
‘And if for some reason I’ve been watched. If Special Branch come down the stairs.’
‘Or out of the back office. Or up from the basement. Or out of the sweet eyes of a nearby old lady.’
‘I ask what’s going on.’
‘You show them your surprise.’
‘I give them the story, and if after a certain number of hours they seem to have something on me, then I say —’
‘What do you say?’
I refuse to cooperate but this does not mean I’m guilty. I would like this noted on the record. I wish to be represented by Madden & Finuncane.
‘Even if they’ve dragged you back to Castlereagh,’ Dawson said. ‘Even if the walls are white and the door is white and the floor tiles are white and the blanket is white. You’ll sit there, naked, refusing to wear their wee white pocketless clothes, won’t you? And what will be in your private world?’
‘My what?’
‘Come on, get it on.’
‘I’ll start to write in my head a book about glass.’
‘Glass!’
It was a thing. He’d read a chapter in a library book, made some notes. The way its mass production came to change the world, showing up muck and clarifying perspectives. Mirrors, monocles, windows. Light entering rooms, touching floors, illuminating enclosed spaces and framing a view. Think about that and conjugate his verbs. Yo escapo, tu escapas. Something about the Spanish language made him want to laugh. The laughs were few these days.
‘Glass,’ Dawson said again, seeming to find something disturbing in the word. He tossed a stone towards a seagull. ‘Your gift for self-deceit, Dan. What a beauty of a gift it is. Pushing through panels to get at the plumbing behind, braiding wires between your fingers, wrapping secret little things in cellophane … I knew from the start that you were a distance man.’