Father and Son Read Online Free Page A

feels nothing. “Can’t say
I’m heartbroken. What comes round, y’know.”
    She smiles as she shakes her head. “No. He wasn’t like that. He was
born in the wrong place and got involved in a war.”
    “Great defence for baby killing.”
    “Y’know, he had this line, about regretting every death in every
armed conflict, every one of them. And he meant it. He carried a shitload of
guilt.”
    “And you believe that? I mean, when you see that young bloke coming
out of the rubble, and he’s holding his own dead baby? Is there enough guilt in
the world for that?”
    She says nothing, purses her lips.
    “An eye for an eye,” he says, almost involuntarily. “That’s fair, isn’t
it, in this case?”
    “You don’t strike me as the hang ’em type.”
    He senses the shift in her voice. Suddenly she’s in interview mode,
her tone unprejudiced, unopinionated. Journalist. Probably can’t help herself.
Lanny was right. Not a word.
    “It just puzzles me,” he says, holding his mug in both hands,
staring down into it, a burning cigarette still between his fingers. “People get
killed all the time, war, random murders, traffic accidents, food poisoning for
christsake… We accept it as part of life. But when it comes to the bloke who
set a bomb that killed a newborn baby we can’t bring ourselves to pull the
trigger. It’s a strange trait of our civilised society, don’t you think? Is
there nothing that deserves death? No act evil enough?”
    He stops, sees the cigarette ash on his trousers, realises he’s been
talking to himself, tears in his eyes. When he looks up, she’s standing behind
the sofa.
    “Well, somebody must’ve thought he deserved it,” she says, almost a
whisper. “I’m gonna have a shower.”
    She moves away without another word.
    John watches her go. She’s only wearing a white t-shirt and skimpy
black pants. Until now he hadn’t noticed.

Chapter Seven
    He grabs her MacBook,
running his fingers along its cold edges. Only Apple could make a computer sexy
to touch. He Googles Sheenan. The obituaries have already started.
     
    Bernard Sheenan, born 1965 in West Belfast, was a product of the
troubles in Ulster, but also an architect of the Peace that followed…
     
    A halo is already being hoisted above his head. An architect of
peace? He killed a baby boy.
     
    … Academically gifted, Sheenan left school at sixteen and became
an apprentice electrician. He had no background in republicanism. His father,
also an electrician, had worked as a contractor for the British army and at
various government installations in Ulster. Whilst still an apprentice, Sheenan
found himself drawn to left-wing politics, and began attending meetings of
various socialist groups. On leaving one of these meetings he was caught up in
the shooting of Terry Forlex, a member of the Provisional IRA, who had also
attended the meeting. Forlex survived, but the incident led to Sheenan’s
radicalisation within the republican movement. In his book about the troubles,
written whilst still in the Maze, Sheenan would refer to this as his ‘whiff of
grapeshot’.
    Sheenan became active in the West Belfast Battalion, quickly gaining
a reputation for both intellectual rigor and physical bravery. He moved to the
British mainland where he worked as an electrician and joined an IRA cell,
providing technical support for the mainland bombing campaign of the late 1980s.
His natural talents as a strategist were soon recognised and by the early 90s
he had become an advisor to the IRA’s Army Council. He was convicted of arms
offences in 1993. From the Maze he became prominent in defining the policy of
the Provos in their final years of terrorist
activity…
     
    John stops reading. Natural talents ? What about the bombs in
pubs, the shootings, the disgusting cowardice of it all? And what about Leeds?
Semtex on a supermarket shelf and no warning given, a job botched so badly that
no one ever claimed responsibility. There’s evil in the