Northern Spy(15)
“We believe she used it to contact the other members of an IRA active service unit,” he says.
“You don’t know that.” Most newsagents sell burner phones. Customers buy them for all sorts of reasons, work, travel, affairs, drugs.
I remember walking Marian down to the bus stop in Greyabbey a few weeks ago, after she’d stayed with me for the weekend. She said she wasn’t ready to go back to the city yet, and was dreading working five shifts in a row. I hadn’t known how to help, except to weigh her bag down with food, leftover roast chicken, risotto, and lemon tart wrapped in tin foil. I waved her off from the stop, holding the baby’s hand so he seemed to wave, too. I remember my sister’s face behind the bus window, energetically waving back at us.
Maybe she’d started taking something to help her through a shift, or to relax afterward. She often has trouble sleeping. She’d tried melatonin and valerian root, maybe she used the phone to buy something stronger.
The detective waits. He wants me to agree with him that she’s a completely different person than she is.
“Has Marian mentioned anything to you about Yorkgate station recently?” he asks.
“No.”
“Are you aware of her making any trips there?”
“No.”
Fenton starts to ask me about different places around the city. The hospital, the courthouse, the stadium. If Marian has visited any of them, if I’ve seen her looking at images of them online. They’re potential targets, I realize. He thinks she’s involved in planning the next attack.
“What about St. George’s market?” he asks.
“Is that a target?” I ask sharply.
“Why?”
“It’s always full of children.”
He nods. The sounds drain from the room. “Has Marian spoken to you about St. George’s?”
“We were there recently.”
His face tightens. “When?”
“At the end of May. The twenty-eighth.”
He asks me about the details of our visit, and I have to think carefully before answering. I can see the green-striped awnings and the different stalls, but not our exact movements around them. It’s pointless anyway. Marian wasn’t performing surveillance that day. We were there to buy the ingredients for linguine alle vongole.
“Were you with your sister the whole time?”
“Yes. Except when she went to the toilets.” The detective leans away from the table. I say, “She went to change Finn. She was only being nice.”
“Did Marian warn you to avoid the market over the coming days?”
“No. Why?”
“We found a pipe bomb in St. George’s market the next day.”
8
ICLOSE MY EYES IN the lift while it lowers me through the building. On the next floor, two uniformed constables step inside. They nod at me, then turn their backs to face the doors. I peel the yellow visitor sticker from my jumper and fold it into a small square.
St. George’s is only a short walk away from the police station. Inside, thin light slants between the high rafters of the market roof. People are milling between the stalls, and sitting on the mezzanine drinking pints or cups of coffee. At one of the tables, a group of men breaks into laughter. Next to me, a woman lifts her wrist to read her watch. A man disappears behind a plastic tarp, its frayed edges moving in his wake.
I look across the crowd. The police have undercover officers posted at train stations in case of an attack, they might be here, too. And someone in this crowd might be a terrorist. The IRA’s first attempt failed, they might be planning to try again.
Two rows of wrought-iron columns reach to the ceiling, which is made of hundreds of small panes of glass. If a bomb were to go off, all of that glass would shatter and rain down. The shards would be traveling as fast as bullets by the time they reached the crowd.
Across the hall, an espresso machine hisses. I don’t know why I’m here, but I can’t bring myself to leave. I move through the crowd. What would a counter-terrorism officer be looking for? How could they possibly know in time? I watch a vendor stirring a cauldron of paella, another rearranging her display of cakes. Most of the vendors seem cheerful and brisk, though they’ve already been on their feet for hours.
They deserve to know about the risk. I want to tell them, except I have no real information. A bomb might rip through here in seconds, or tomorrow, or next year, or never. The same could be said of any crowded place in Belfast.
The fish stalls where we bought the clams for our linguine are at the north end of the hall. Here the air is colder from all the crushed ice. Customers are buying oysters, asking about the monkfish, tasting samples of dried seaweed. Water drips from a hose in the corner. I find the vendor selling mussels, clams, and scallops. This same man took our order, placing it on the same scale. I remember watching as one side of it dropped under the weight.
The market was even more crowded then. I felt relaxed, with the baby in his carrier on my chest. He was wearing the cardigan Marian had given him, with buttons shaped like Peter Rabbit. Marian had bought some rose-flavored Turkish delight. She let Finn hold the bag, and he sat in his carrier, levered forward a little, gripping the pouch of dusty-pink marzipan cubes.
Marian had on a Fair Isle jumper, with her raincoat tied around her waist and her brown hair twisted up in a knot. She was there with us, laughing and talking as we moved between the stalls.