Cold humour glittered in King Billy’s eyes. ‘Is that what you think? Believe all that rhetoric, do you? Then what followed hard on the heels of the Brighton bombing at the Grand Hotel that damn near killed Prime Minister Thatcher? I’ll tell you, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, giving one sovereign state a say in the running of another country. It’s a world precedent. So the Provos saw the door ajar — just one more push. The Number Ten mortar attack, the City bombs. Then we get the Downing Street Declaration, pushing us inexorably towards Dublin. Each time the resolve of the government weakens. No, my friends, the Provisional IRA will destroy the talks and the hope for peace, or they will have their say. There are some pressures that no government can resist, no matter what they say. That is what terrorism is all about. And meanwhile we are left excluded. Our fate in the hands of others.’
‘We?’ Casey asked.
‘Let us say those of us of a more determined persuasion.’
‘You’ve got Protestant politicians.’ Mercs’s gruff voice intervened. ‘I can’t see them giving up without a fight.’
King Billy gave a derisory snort. ‘Abe Powers is in the chair. A known diehard Republican sympathiser. He’ll drive a tough bargain and our politicians will have to compromise.’
Mercs said: ‘How can they be said to have compromised if they’ve won. If Dublin renounces its claim on Northern Ireland, then the Orange Ulstermen have nothing to fear.’
‘That’s a worthless piece of paper!’ King Billy almost spat with venom. ‘The intent remains and always will. News from the talks is scarce, but I understand it’s all in the small print. Ulster will be left a political mish-mash, a vacuum, a nothing place, ripe for the Provisional IRA’s final takeover. Realpolitik is what counts, not articles written into constitutions.’
Casey frowned. ‘Do I gather you hate these talks almost as much as the IRA?’
King Billy glanced to one side to where Spike stood, his arms folded across his broad chest. The young man gave a respectfully knowing smirk. ‘You could say that. But, unlike the taigs, we are not working to destroy them. Our intention is to help, to take some pressure off the British Government.’
‘How?’
‘Like you, however difficult it will be — and it will — we intend to find the bombers.’
Mercs was puzzled. ‘What real good would it do you if the bombing stopped? What would you realistically stand to gain?’
King Billy hesitated in his reply, stared at his huge hands clumped on the desk, sniffed heavily, then looked directly at Mercs. ‘A place at the conference table. It’s what we deserve. Forget the politicians, we are the real voice of the Ulster people.’
Mercs grunted. ‘I think at least forty-three per cent of the population might disagree with you.’
Casey winced. She knew full well that Mercs considered King Billy and his ilk to be nothing more than racist thugs, no better and no worse than the Provisionals. This was not the place to make those views plain. Not in some dark, back-street building, alone and defenceless in the lion’s den.
But, to her surprise, King Billy just leaned back and smiled benignly as though he had heard such sentiments expressed a million times before. ‘Mr Mercs, do you know why we’re here?’
‘What you mean?’
‘Or you, dear American lady, whose compatriots seem to believe that the British are an army of occupation? Do you know why we — the Scottish Irish, as the Irish Irish would call us — are here in Ulster?’
Casey looked vague.
‘No doubt you’ve heard the disparaging jokes about history in Ireland being as close as yesterday? Two points you must never forget. The first settlers in Ireland in the Stone Age — caveman days — were the Cruthin, Nordic peoples in search of warmer climes. The taigs — the Celts who claim Ireland as their own didn’t arrive until the Iron Age. Came from central Europe. That’s a gap of five thousand years. We, the Protestant Scots originally came from Northern Ireland anyway and returned to resettle a mere two thousand years later in Tudor times — a blink in history by comparison. Henry the Eighth had a row with Rome over his bigamous habits, you’ll recall, and introduced the Reformation. In Ireland, steeped in Catholicism through historical chance, this was resisted and proved to be a thorn in his side.’
Casey blinked as she listened to this most weird of history lessons coming from Big King Billy. Her knowledge of the period was scant, learned mostly from Hollywood movies. Nevertheless she was intrigued.
‘Then under Henry’s daughter, Elizabeth the First, the Catholic chieftains in Ulster tried to forge an alliance with England’s oldest and bitterest enemy, Catholic Spain! The Spanish even sent a small armada, thank God defeated by the English.
‘Is it any surprise the English began their so-called “plantation programme”? Land ir the north was confiscated from the taigs and tens of thousands of Scots and English were encouraged to settle. And we’ve been here longer than the Virginian settlers have been in America — since 1607. They’ve got their bit and we’ve got ours. The trouble is, they want it all.’
Mercs said darkly: ‘Maybe London thinks there’d be less hassle iftheyhadit.’
King Billy didn’t answer immediately. He reached forward and tilted his green-shaded lamp to shine on the wall above his head. There was a water-stained sepia print: rows of young men, all in khaki and most with drooping moustaches, standing woodenly as they stared at the camera. ‘One of those is my grandda. Richie Baker of the 36th (Ulster) Division. Won the ME. Died, alongside two thousand fellow Ulstermen who volunteered to fight for the Crown, on the first of July 1916. The Battle of the Somme. That is our blood bond with Britain.’ He paused to let his audience understand the significance of his words. ‘And what were the IRA doing at this time? The Easter Rising against British rule in Dublin, that’s what! With arms supplied by the Kaiser — although these were thankfully intercepted.
‘Is it any surprise that when the Free State was formed in 1921, the sacrifice of my father and the others was rewarded with the right to remain British?’
‘But the Irish never accepted that,’ Mercs pointed out.
‘Sinn Fein and the other diehards never have. I told you, they want it all. And if proof were needed of the taigs’ continued treachery, when the Second World War came and Britain was fighting for its life, for the survival of free Europe, Ireland declared itself neutral. Bloody neutral! And here in Ulster the IRA were showing torches from the rooftops to guide the Luftwaffe bombers onto Belfast!’ He shook his head as though he couldn’t believe his own story.
Casey tried to lighten the atmosphere; it was so heavy with hatred, it was almost tangible. ‘But surely there have been times of peace? Can’t you see a way of living together without violence?’
‘There’s never been peace. Miss Mullins. The IRA’s presence has always been there like a guttering candle that won’t go out. But you’re right, there was a time at the start of these troubles in the early seventies. I admit we’d been a bit hard on the taigs keeping them out of local politics and the best jobs — and I think we felt some guilt. The “Civil Rights movement pricked more than a few consciences until it was hijacked by the IRA.’
‘Was your conscience pricked, Billy?’ Mercs asked innocently.
The big man laughed, a patronising laugh that he reserved for those who didn’t understand. ‘Not all Proddies were rich, middle-class and privileged, Eddie. I lived in what you would call a slum with no inside privy. Left school at fifteen to work as a stager at Harland and Wolff until my back gave up. My simple life evolved around supporting the Blues at football and playing the drum for the local Orange flute band. The taig kids used to walk past our house on their way to their good schools in their neat fancy uniforms. They moaned about living in the Divis Flats, yet my ma would have given her right arm to live in one of those modern flats. No, Eddie, the taigs didn’t look so hard done by to me.’ His smile melted away as if it had never been. Now the grim authoritarian face of the feudal chieftain had returned. ‘They’ve done their best to destroy our cities and now they’re out to destroy yours. We’re on the same side, Eddie, fighting the common enemy.’