No one in the news meeting will see any sign of how the day began for me, even though my mornings with the baby are monumental, and dense. Some of them have children, but I don’t try to imagine their own mornings at home, not wanting to intrude, even hypothetically. Though I do love when anything about their families slips out, when Nicholas groaned that his son had scraped the car, when Esther said cheerfully that her daughters used to fight “like dogs in the street.”
The editors start pitching their stories, and I listen, not looking as if I’ve left anything behind.
* * *
—
After our meeting, I’m researching an interview when reception calls up to say a package has arrived for me by courier. I open the padded envelope in a toilet stall. Inside is a burner phone.
At home, I unwrap the charger, plug the phone into an outlet, and watch as the screen floods with blue pixels. For the rest of the week, nothing happens. I move the phone between different bags, sleep with it next to my bed, place it by the sink while showering.
I’ve tested its volume so many times that when the ringtone finally sounds on Sunday, it takes me a moment to understand that someone is on the other end. I stiffen, holding one of Finn’s shirts in my hands, and he takes the chance to scoot away. He chunters happily to himself, half dressed, as I lift the phone. “Hello, Tessa, it’s Seamus. We’re going to need you today.”
* * *
—
Seamus has asked me to watch the police station in Saintfield. I’m to write a note of each car that drives in or out. Once the unit has my list, they will watch for these cars on the road. Seamus is constantly searching for police officers to kill. It’s not easy to find their names anymore, or where they live. When another unit murdered a detective inspector in Coleraine, Seamus went to the funeral, hoping to find his next target. And he went back to the grave the next day, in case any of the other detectives had signed their names on their cards or wreaths.
“Psychopath,” I said, and Marian said, “That’s not even the worst of it.”
A woman in the IRA became a primary school teacher. “What does your mammy do?” she asked the children. “What does your daddy do?” If one of the children said, “He’s a police officer,” the teacher would tell her brigade so they could kill him.
My fury hearing that felt like panic. I can’t go back in time and gather all those children together and lead them out of her classroom, so instead I’m here, sitting in a café across from a police station.
Eamonn warned the chief constable about the surveillance operation. Some of the cars will be painted or given new registration numbers, and others will be left out on the roads as bait. One of their drivers might have been murdered otherwise, without my interference. I’ve thrown a spanner in Seamus’s plan.
My phone rings from my handbag. “Did you pack baby wipes?” asks Tom.
“They’re in his bag.”
“I don’t see them.”
“Check the bottom.”
“Found them,” he says after a minute, which is the sort of interaction that makes being a single mother not seem so bad.
My concentration has broken, like Finn has suddenly toddled into the café, and takes a few minutes to settle again. I look out at the station across the road. The shift is changing over. Five cars have already driven into the station, and I’ve taken down their registrations on the newspaper crossword. Seamus told me to bring a paper, not a local one. “You read The Guardian? Yes? That’s fine.”
He believes in the details. That’s how he hasn’t been lifted or killed yet. He told me to order food. He didn’t specify what, so I order a fry-up. Two fried eggs, baked beans, grilled tomato, potato bread, and tea with milk. Not the full Ulster, though, not with black pudding and sausages. Marian once mentioned that Seamus shouldn’t have meat anymore, since his heart attack.
“When did he have a heart attack?” I asked. “Isn’t he young for one?”
“Forty,” she said. “It’s common for IRA members, with the stress.”
The officer commanding for Belfast gave Seamus the option to retire honorably. “But he’ll never quit,” said Marian. Or stop eating steak, for that matter, or rashers, black pudding, sausages. Which is maddening. I don’t want a heart attack to kill him. I want him in a court, not being given a paramilitary funeral, not retired.
“They get pensions now,” Marian said. “And the real players are given villas in Bulgaria.”