Brute Force

106

I put back the letters and closed the drawers. As I stood up, my torch beam brushed past a row of photographs on the mantelpiece. One was of a tall man with unkempt hair, dressed in jeans and a camouflage T-shirt, his left arm draped round the shoulders of a beautiful olive-skinned woman, several years older than him. A few strands of hair had been blown across her face by the wind. They were standing in front of a house – this house. It hadn't changed at all.

As I stared at Lesser's lank hair and her piercing, sea-green eyes, the years peeled back. The dock, the Bahiti, finning across the harbour . . . Layla disappearing down the gangway with Mansour . . . Big Ben sliced almost in half by the det cord . . .

I panned left and there he was in more familiar gear: khaki combat jacket, black beret and shades – the uniform of the Provisionals. He was out on some bog, in the middle of nowhere; low, grey clouds scudding in from the Atlantic behind him. He beamed from ear to ear, clutching an Armalite, draped in the Tricolour and flashing a victory sign at the camera.

My gaze shifted to the next frame: this time no guns, no uniform; just jeans and a T-shirt. It must have been dress-down Friday. A summer's day, outside a cottage just like Dom's. From the look of him, the cut of his hair – short – and the zips and chains on his jeans, the shot must have been taken in the late seventies, when Lesser was in his early twenties.

Next to him was a girl with a pale complexion and the same unruly hair – a little older than him; a sister maybe.

She took centre stage in the last photo. The backdrop was the same – the cottage in Ireland – but this time a smiling, olive-skinned schoolgirl was hanging off her neck. She looked about five or six, no more, but I was shit at guessing kids' ages. She had an awkward, gap-toothed smile and I had the uneasy feeling that I'd seen her somewhere before. I turned back towards the door and stopped.

Lesser and Layla. Lesser and the girl, and a kid with olive-tanned skin and jet-black hair – all on Layla's mantelpiece.

I ran down the corridor to the bedroom and yanked the dust-sheet off the nearer of the two bedside tables and there they were – the intimate shots you didn't put on public display: Layla, pale and drawn, clutching a newborn, olive-skinned baby to her chest; Layla and the baby again, this time in laces and ribbons; and then the infant with Lesser's sister . . . no sign of Layla at all.

I pulled open the drawer and found letters, tucked away in envelopes with Irish postmarks, with Layla's name and address – a PO Box in Tripoli – scrawled in big, loopy handwriting. I opened one and was confronted by the same writing and a wobbly drawing of a horse. Dear Mummy . . .

I opened another. Different drawing, same writing, a bit more mature. More letters, more drawings, the same story . . .

Hamdi and Lesser – they'd had a kid; and, by the look of it, given her up for adoption.

I moved round the opposite side of the bed and whipped the dust-sheet off the other table. Lesser, in a large, black and white portrait, surrounded by an ornate silver frame, stared back at me – at the time he'd met Hamdi in the desert, I guessed, every inch the young shit-stirrer, doing his best Che Guevara imitation.

And then there was a picture of Lesser standing beside the little girl, holding her hand – in the garden of the cottage again. The girl was seven or eight; Lesser now in his early thirties. It could only have been months, maybe even weeks, before he was dropped.

Another shot. The girl, in school uniform, giving the camera a self-conscious smile, braces on her teeth, the first signs she was developing into a young woman. And another. The girl on a pier or a ferry, leaning against railings, the sea behind her: teenaged, intense, angst-ridden, no smile, but more than a hint of her mother's haunting beauty. And finally, a big portrait, black and white again, like Lesser's – their girl all grown up.

And I had seen her before. I knew her. I'd met her.

My eyes flicked across the pictures again.

Lesser. Hamdi. The baby. The crofter's cottage. The schoolgirl. The girl on the pier or the ferry, whatever it fucking was . . .

The ferry.

Little Miss Camcorder. Mairead O'Connell.