In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read Free Page B

Rover and got inside. We were just in time to hear the Chart Show announcing the Christmas Number 1 for 1983. It was “Only You” by Vince Clarke—rerecorded by some tedious a cappella group.
    “The musical taste of this country baffles me these days,” I said.
    Jimmy smiled his twenty-four-year-old smile and said nothing.
    I persuaded him to switch the channel to Radio 3 and Bach took us back to South Armagh.
    When we parked at the police station I noticed that the driver’s-side wing mirror was cracked. “Look at that,” I said. “Could we have hit something on the road?”
    “Nah, it was cracked before we left. I’m pretty sure.”
    There was no sign of blood or other forensic material.
    It’s probably nothing , I thought, and we went inside the heavily fortified barracks to complete the remainder of our shift.

We were nearing the end of the foot patrol, which as any peeler or squaddie will tell you is the most sickening part of the whole business. We were close to the police station on the top of the hill and to be shot within sight of home would be very irritating.
    The village was empty. It was a quiet Saturday morning well before the market. We walked down the middle of the road along the white lines.
    The houses on the left-hand side were in the Irish Republic, those on the right were in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Our job was to patrol this border and prevent smuggling and the free movement of IRA arms, personnel, and money. The geography made it an absurd situation. When Northern Ireland had been created in 1921 everyone had assumed that it was only going to be a temporary solution to the problem of Ireland’s self-rule. No one seriously thought that the complicated twisty county lines of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh could possibly become the permanent and policeable border between two separate countries. Yet they had and this border now ran through fields, villages, sometimes through farms and individual houses. All along it there were exclaves, enclaves, salients, and other utterly unpatrollable cartographical features.
    And here in the village of Bellaughray the border ran through the center of town. Technically we were supposed to keep to the right-hand side of the road, because anything over that white dotted line would be an incursion into the sovereign territory of the Irish Republic and, in theory, a diplomatic incident; but if you did keep right you were exposed to snipers all along the County Monaghan hillside, so when I was leading the patrols, I kept us on the Eire side of the street where the houses would protect us.
    Walking slowly and in single file, we reached the central Bellaughray roundabout, and now it was only three hundred yards to the station.
    I had taken eight men out in full body armor and we were heavily laden with flares, radios, and Sterling machine guns. As usual it had been an exhausting patrol. We had walked across boggy fields, over sheughs and stone walls, through swamp and slurry and cow shit. We had found no trace of IRA men or petrol smugglers or sheep stealers, or sheep shaggers come to that, but nevertheless we had all put our lives on the line for the last hour and a half.
    The IRA snipers were good, and thanks to Yankee dollars they had acquired sophisticated high-velocity rifles. They knew our routines and routes and could easily have been waiting for us from a concealed den or lair up to three thousand feet away.
    But they weren’t. Not this morning anyway. We went through the roundabout in single file and reached the tiny Catholic chapel.
    The hedge around the wee red-brick structure bothered me. It was thick and you couldn’t see through it and anything could have been lurking behind: a man with a gun, a concealed explosive device . . .
    I sent Constable Williams to recon it while I signaled the rest of the patrol to drop to one knee. Williams went ahead, looked behind the hedge, and found nothing.
    He gave me the