Christmas was coming, but the city was hardly festive. Many shops were boarded up and closed, because they had been bombed. Jean McConville’s only indulgence in those days was a regular excursion to play bingo at a local social club. Whenever she won anything, she would give the children twenty pence each. Occasionally, she would bring home enough to buy one of them a new pair of shoes. One night after the family had moved into the new flat, Jean went with a friend to play bingo. But on that particular evening, she did not come home.
Shortly after 2 a.m., there was a knock at the door. It was a British soldier, who informed the McConville kids that their mother was at a barracks nearby. Helen raced to the barracks and found Jean, bedraggled and shoeless, her hair all over the place. Jean said that she had been at the bingo hall when someone came in and told her that one of the children had been hit by a car, and that someone was waiting outside to take her to the hospital. Alarmed, she left the bingo hall and got into the car. But it was a trap: when the door opened, Jean was pushed onto the floor and a hood was placed over her head. She was taken to a derelict building, she said, where she was tied to a chair, beaten and interrogated. After she was released, some army officers found her wandering the streets, distressed, and brought her to the barracks.
Jean couldn’t – or wouldn’t – say who it was that had abducted her. When Helen wondered what kinds of questions they had been asking, Jean was dismissive. ‘A load of nonsense,’ she said. ‘Stuff I knew nothing about.’ Jean could not sleep that night. Instead she sat up, her face bruised, her eyes black and blue, and lit one cigarette after another. She told Helen that she missed Arthur.
The children would later recall that it was the following evening that Jean sent Helen out to fetch fish and chips for dinner. She filled a bath, to try to soothe the pain of the beating she had taken the night before. As Helen was leaving, she said, ‘Don’t be stopping for a sneaky smoke.’
Helen made her way through the labyrinthine passages of Divis to a local takeaway where she ordered dinner and waited for it. When the food was ready, she paid, took the greasy bag, and started to walk back. As she entered the complex, she noticed something strange. People were loitering on the balconies outside their flats. This was the sort of thing that local residents did in the summertime. There were so few places for recreation in Divis that kids would play ball on the balconies and parents would hang about on temperate evenings, leaning in the doorways, gossiping over cigarettes. But not in December. As Helen got closer to the new flat and saw the people gathered outside, she broke into a run.
6
A vacant house stood on Leeson Street, opposite the short block known as Varna Gap. Such derelict properties pockmarked Belfast’s landscape – burned out, gutted or abandoned, their windows and doors covered in plywood. The people who lived there had simply fled and never come back. Across the street from the vacant house, Brendan Hughes stood with a few of his associates from D Company. It was a Saturday, 2 September 1972.
Looking up, Hughes noticed a green van appear some distance away and begin to approach, along Leeson Street. He watched the van closely, something about it making him uneasy. He usually carried a handgun, but that morning an associate had borrowed it so that he could use it to steal a car. So Hughes found himself unarmed. The van drove right past him, close enough for Hughes to briefly glimpse the driver. It was a man. Not one he recognised. He looked nervous. But the van kept moving, right on down through McDonnell Street and onto the Grosvenor Road. Hughes watched it disappear. Then, just to be on the safe side, he sent one of his runners to fetch a weapon.
At twenty-four, Hughes was small but strong and nimble, with thick black eyebrows and a mop of unruly black hair. He was the officer commanding – ‘the OC’ – for D Company of the Provisional IRA, in charge of this part of West Belfast, which made him a target not just for loyalist paramilitaries, the police and the British Army but for the Stickies (the Official IRA) as well. Eighteen months earlier, Hughes’s cousin Charlie, his predecessor as OC of D Company, had been shot and killed by the Officials. So Hughes was ‘on the run’, in the parlance of the IRA: he was living underground, a man targeted by multiple armed organisations. In rural areas, you could stay on the run for years at a time, but in Belfast, where everybody knew everybody, you would be lucky to stick it out for six months. Someone would get you eventually.
Hughes had joined the Provos in early 1970. It was through his cousin Charlie that he had initially got involved, but he soon established himself in his own right as a shrewd and tenacious soldier. Hughes moved from house to house, seldom sleeping in the same bed on consecutive nights. D Company’s territory embraced the Grosvenor Road, the old Pound Loney area, the Falls Road – the hottest territory in the conflict. Initially, the company had only twelve members, and they became known as the Dogs, or the Dirty Dozen. Hughes adhered to a philosophy, instilled in him at a young age by his father, that if you want to get people to do something for you, you do it with them. So he wasn’t just sending men on operations – he went along on the missions himself. Dolours Price first met Hughes when she joined the IRA, and she was dazzled by him. ‘He seemed to be a hundred places at the one time,’ she recalled, adding, ‘I don’t think he slept.’ Despite his small stature, Hughes struck Price as a ‘giant of a man’. It meant something to her, and to others, that he asked no volunteer to do anything he would not do himself.
D Company was carrying out a dizzying number of operations, often as many as four or five each day. You would rob a bank in the morning, do a ‘float’ in the afternoon – prowling the streets in a car, casting around, like urban hunters, for a British soldier to shoot – stick a bomb in a booby trap before supper, then take part in a gun battle or two that night. They were heady, breakneck days, and Hughes lived from operation to operation – robbing banks, robbing post offices, holding up trains, planting bombs, shooting at soldiers. To Hughes, it seemed like a grand adventure. He thought of going out and getting into gunfights the way other people thought about getting up and going to the office. He liked the fact that there was a momentum to the operations, a relentless tempo, which fuelled and perpetuated the armed struggle, because each successful operation drew new followers to the cause. In the words of one of Hughes’s contemporaries in the IRA, ‘Good operations are the best recruiting sergeant.’
As the legend of Brendan Hughes, the young guerrilla commander, took hold around Belfast, the British became determined to capture him. But there was a problem: they did not know what he looked like. Hughes’s father had destroyed every family photograph in which he appeared, knowing that they could be used to identify him. The soldiers referred to him as ‘Darkie’, or ‘the Dark’, on account of his complexion, and the name stuck, a battlefield sobriquet. But the British did not know what his face looked like, and on many an occasion, Hughes had walked right past the soldiers’ sandbagged posts, just another shaggy-haired Belfast lad. They didn’t give him a second look.
The soldiers would go to his father’s house and rouse him from bed, looking for Hughes. Once, when they hauled his father in for questioning, Hughes was incensed to learn that after two days of interrogation, the old man had been forced to walk home barefoot. The soldiers told his father that they weren’t looking for Brendan in order to arrest him; their intention was to kill him.
This was not an idle threat. The previous April, an Official IRA leader named ‘Big Joe’ McCann had been walking, unarmed, one day when he was stopped by British troops. He tried to flee but was shot. McCann had dyed his hair as a disguise, but they recognised him. He was only wounded by the initial shots, and he staggered away. But rather than call an ambulance, the soldiers fired another volley to finish the job. When they searched his pockets, they found nothing that could plausibly be described as a weapon, just