‘Mr Higgins. What brings you here?’
‘I won’t come in, Sean. I’m on my way to Heathrow.’
‘Is that a fact. A holiday in the sun, is it?’
‘Not exactly. Belfast. I’ll probably miss the last shuttle, but I’ll be on the breakfast plane. Get word to Liam Devlin. Tell him I’ll be staying at the Europa Hotel and I must see him.’
‘Jesus, Mr Higgins, and how would I be knowing such a desperate fella as that?’
Through the door I could hear the music from the bar. They were singing ‘Guns of the IRA’. ‘Don’t argue, Sean, just do it,’ I said. ‘It’s important.’
I knew he would, of course, and turned away without another word. A couple of minutes later I hailed a cab and was on my way to Heathrow.
The Europa Hotel in Belfast was legendary amongst newspaper men from all over the world. It had survived numerous bombing attacks by the IRA and stood in Great Victoria Street next to the railway station. I stayed in my room on the eighth floor for most of the day, just waiting. Things seemed quiet enough, but it was an uneasy calm and in the late afternoon, there was a crump of a bomb and when I looked out of the window I saw a black pall of smoke in the distance.
Just after six, with darkness falling, I decided to go down to the bar for a drink, was pulling on my jacket when the phone went. A voice said, ‘Mr Higgins? Reception here, sir. Your taxi’s waiting.’
It was a black cab, the London variety, and the driver was a middle-aged woman, a pleasant-faced lady who looked like your favourite aunty. I pulled back the glass panel between us and gave her the ritual Belfast greeting.
‘Good night to you.’
‘And you.’
‘Not often I see a lady cab driver, not in London anyway.’
‘A terrible place that. What would you expect? You sit quiet now like a good gentleman and enjoy the trip.’
She closed the panel with one hand. The journey took no more than ten minutes. We passed along the Falls Road, a Catholic area I remembered well from boyhood and turned into a warren of mean side streets, finally stopping outside a church. She opened the glass panel.
‘The first confessional box on the right as you go in.’
‘If you say so.’
I got out and she drove away instantly. The board said ‘Church of the Holy Name’ and it was in surprisingly good condition, the times of Mass and confession listed in gold paint. I opened the door at the top of the steps and went in. It was not too large and dimly lit, candles flickering down at the altar, the Virgin in a chapel to one side. Instinctively, I dipped my fingers in the holy water and crossed myself, remembering the Catholic aunt in South Armagh who’d raised me for a while as a child and had anguished over my black little Protestant soul.
The confessional boxes stood to one side. No one waited, which was hardly surprising, for according to the board outside I was an hour early. I went in the first on the right and closed the door. I sat there in the darkness for a moment and then the grill slid open.
‘Yes?’ a voice asked softly.
I answered automatically. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned.’
‘You certainly have, my old son.’ The light was switched on in the other box and Liam Devlin smiled through at me.
He looked remarkably well. In fact, rather better than he’d seemed the last time I’d seen him. Sixty-seven, but as I’d said to Ruth Cohen, lively with it. A small man with enormous vitality, hair as black as ever, and vivid blue eyes. There was the scar of an old bullet wound on the left side of his forehead and a slight, ironic smile was permanently in place. He wore a priest’s cassock and clerical collar and seemed perfectly at home in the sacristy at the back of the church to which he’d taken me.
‘You’re looking well, son. All that success and money.’ He grinned. ‘We’ll drink to it. There’s a bottle here surely.’