Less so at the change in mood come evening. His father in from town, overweight and sweating from the commute, the taint of alcohol on his breath and his mother trying nervously to please. Cold drinks and quick supper to the form stretched out on the sofa. Tick, tick, tick, boom!
Which is what the file dealt with.
In 1973, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) acted on a crude calculation. That a bomb in London was worth thirty in Belfast. It was an equation based on an easy algebra where x was the number of high-profile targets, y was the density of population and their sum, as future Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would later describe it, was ‘the oxygen of publicity’.
The terrorists sent active service units (ASUs) to England. The first of these attacked the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey in the City of London, injuring over 200 with one man dying of a heart attack.
The gang was arrested trying to flee England by plane shortly after the explosion and with security forces on full alert.
The IRA learnt quickly and changed tactic, activating a cell later known as The Balcombe Street Gang to maintain a sustained campaign of atrocities and all the while based in England. For 15 months, it succeeded.
Pubs where soldiers gathered, top London restaurants and hotels, up-market shops like Harrod’s and Selfridges, all were bombed or machine gunned as were mainline London stations at Euston and King’s Cross.
Nor did the gang confine themselves to London, bombing pubs in Birmingham and Guildford
before being eventually tracked down to Balcombe Street in London where, after a siege lasting several days, its four main members were arrested in December 1975.
The attacks had reached a crescendo of one every three days in the previous year. By the time the cell was apprehended, 19 people were dead and hundreds injured.
Christopher paused for a moment, lifting his glasses off his eyes and rubbing them to clear his head as much as his vision.
He glanced down again, the file went on in this vein for some time. Each page outlined a new horror, a fresh tragedy and he was uncertain as to why Francis had handed him a file containing a brief history of the IRA’s activity in mainland Britain.
All this had been wrapped up long ago without ever going away. Sporadic up-surges of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland now ran cover for the terrorist-turned-gangster unemployed of the old paramilitaries. Occasional trials of junior British Army soldiers, still pursued long after the IRA had welcomed its convicted back into the welcoming embrace of warm hearth and warmer mythology. Warnings from the intelligence services that the heart still beat in the old beast of Irish grievance even as Britain’s erratic memory failed it.
