That night, after flying to London, with almost empty purses, the Conlon family – Sarah, Gerry’s two younger sisters, Bridie and Ann, and two relatives – put their heads down in a one-bedroom flat in Westbourne Terrace Road, Maida Vale. The flat was occupied by Sarah’s brother, Hughie Maguire, and his wife, Kate. The Conlons slept on ‘the floors, the settee and chairs’.
The next day, Sarah, Bridie and Ann visited Gerry in Brixton Prison. He was as baffled as they were about the speed of events, but he had enough of a grasp of the situation to put in an order for new jeans and a shirt – in case he had to stand in front of the television cameras. His mother protested, saying that she did not have the money to buy him new clothes. But, as mothers often do, she found it. Sarah’s brother, Hughie, on hearing of Gerry’s request, put his hand into his pocket and handed his sister enough money to buy the jeans and shirt.
On 19 October 1989, two black London taxis brought the extended Conlon family to the Old Bailey. At a side entrance, they were met by a court official who led them up a set of back stairs and into the upper gallery of Court Number Two, the court where the original verdicts had been pronounced fifteen years earlier. At the same time as Sarah and her family were entering the court, the Guildford Four walked up the stairs from the cells below and stood in the dock. Before long, they heard evidence that at their original trial in 1975, the police had deleted, and added to, parts of Paddy Armstrong’s original interview notes. This could be viewed only as an attempt by police to enhance their case against him. The case was then declared unsafe and the verdicts quashed.
Finally, having emerged from the underbelly of the Trojan horse, Gerry Conlon, in a cyclone of righteous fury, stormed out of the Old Bailey and told the world’s press: ‘I’ve been in prison for fifteen years for something I didn’t do. For something I didn’t know anything about. A totally innocent man. I watched my father die in prison for something he didn’t do. He is innocent. The Maguires are innocent. Let’s hope the Birmingham Six are freed.’
It is not hard to imagine old men in long wigs and ermine groaning and gnashing their teeth as they watched Conlon on television. Never one to hold his tongue, Lord Denning said publicly what many of his fellow law lords would, no doubt, have been saying in private: ‘British justice is in ruins.’
Later, in an interview with ITN, Conlon said of his Old Bailey pronouncement: ‘That wasn’t me speaking. That was my dad. That was my dad.’
Gerry’s mother was not a lady who courted the limelight. While Gerry and his sisters Ann and Bridie were driven in a limousine to the Holiday Inn, near Swiss Cottage (where ITN had organised a champagne reception), Sarah and other family members took a taxi to the hotel. On the way across London, Gerry was full of verve. Ann McKernan recalled: ‘He couldn’t sit for a second. There was a sunroof in the limo, and he opened it and stuck his head out the top of the car, and he was waving the whole way to the hotel, and people were shouting at him as if they knew what had happened and who he was.’25
When Conlon was led into the reception room in the Holiday Inn, the first person he saw was his mother, whom he lifted off her feet, whirled around and kissed. For Sarah Conlon, it must have been a bittersweet moment; she had finally been reunited with her son, but her husband would never be coming home.
Also present was Diana St. James, Gerry’s pretty American girlfriend. Diana, with whom he had been corresponding while in prison, would travel back to Belfast with him.
The mood was light for the rest of the evening, but Gerry felt uneasy about the pervasive attention. Strangers were coming up to him and shaking his hand, asking him to relate his experiences of prison. Later that night, as he was going up in the lift to his room, he noticed that two burly men had walked into the elevator with him. When he proceeded down the corridor to his room, they followed him. He turned and asked them what they were doing and they told him they had been hired as bodyguards by ITN to ensure his safety. As the bodyguards stood on either side of his bedroom door, Conlon felt that they represented a life experience he wanted to put behind him: ‘To my mind the only difference between these two and a couple of screws were the clothes.’26
There was a party that night in Gerry’s penthouse suite, with the mini-bar being continually emptied and restocked. Then, at around five o’clock in the morning, Gerry took a panic attack. He went to his mother’s room and explained to her how miserable he was feeling. He wept. At this point, his Uncle Hughie brought him back to his flat in Westbourne Terrace Road.
At breakfast in the hotel the next morning, Ann McKernan asked Hughie what had happened to Gerry, and Hughie said: ‘I gave him my leather jacket and we went for a walk in the rain.’
‘And then what happened?’
‘And then Gerry said to me, “Isn’t this brilliant? I haven’t walked in the rain for fifteen years.”’
Hughie went on to tell Ann that Gerry later phoned his solicitor and friend Gareth Peirce to come and collect him. Gerry was discovering that there was a lot more to freedom than simply not being locked up: he had got out of jail, but jail had not got out of him.
On 31 December 1974, Gerry Conlon was flown from Belfast to England on a draughty RAF transport plane. Handcuffed to a hostile detective, he was bewildered at the enormity of the charges being levelled against him, and he was terrified. Perhaps his teeth were chattering; perhaps he was shivering. For sure, he had no idea of the hardships and tribulations that lay ahead. On 21 October 1989, he returned to Belfast with no hostile detective. He was not handcuffed, and he was not on board a chilly RAF transport plane. Instead, he was on a plush private jet with his sister Ann, Diana St James and friends, courtesy of ITN. During the flight, he helped himself to smoked salmon and champagne. Gerry Conlon probably thought he was free at last. He wasn’t.
Two
‘I hope your arse is well greased, Hill.’
‘It’s buttered-up like a big Belfast bap, Conlon.’
‘It’d better be ’cause I’ve a wee parcel here to keep you entertained in them there dark nights.’1
As he casts his agile memory back to his visit with Gerry Conlon in Gartree Prison on 28 October 1989, Paddy Hill lifts a rolled-up cigarette from the glass dining table and lights up. He inhales deeply and exhales slowly. How did Gerry smuggle in the hash and the tobacco? ‘Between his bum cheeks,’ Hill answers matter-of-factly. And how did the transfer take place? ‘Gerry looked around to see if any screws were watching and, when he saw there wasn’t, he shoved his hand down the back of his trousers and when it came back up again, there was a cylindrical parcel wrapped in cling-paper in it.’ Hill takes another draw on his cigarette. ‘The next thing, he casually reached over the table to me, as if shaking my hand, and passed me the parcel. I bangled [secreted in rectum] it immediately. “There’s two ounces of snout and two ounces of hash in there”, he said. Believe me; that brought a smile to my face.’
It still brings a smile to his face. Hill casually relights his cigarette. It does not seem to have crossed his mind that, just over a week after Gerry had thundered out of the Old Bailey, declaring to the world that he had spent fifteen years in prison for something he did not do, and after being on the front page of practically every newspaper in the western hemisphere, Gerry Conlon had risked being returned to prison for smuggling two ounces of hash into prison.
‘Nah, that wouldn’t have happened. Y’see, we knew all the moves.’2
But in the jungle of everyday life, outside of prison, Gerry barely knew any moves, and in the years after his release, he would return to a recurring theme: ‘There are days when I wish I was still in prison.’
It is not hard to see why there was