After a general seminar one day, he stayed on to discuss something with his professor. Visiting the bar afterwards, he was hailed by two third-year students named Graham and Green who'd also taken part in the seminar. They were local students from Derry, which was all he knew about them except that they didn't appeal, particularly Green, with his greasy, unkempt hair and shabby jeans. His liking for the drink was also clear. A nasty piece of work, Daniel had decided, and he tried to avoid him.
"Come on, man," Green said. "You need a drink. What a bloody bore Wilkinson's seminar was. He gets worse all the time. Get us some beers, why don't you?"
Daniel joined them with reluctance, returning with three bottles from the bar, determined to be off of there in ten minutes. Green was already edging into drunkenness. "How's it going, my English friend? Someone said you were from Yorkshire."
Remembering Liam's advice, Daniel hadn't advertised his Ulster roots. "That's right."
"Are the girls any good where you come from?"
Daniel shrugged. "The same as they are anywhere, no different." "Nice girls, are they, decent? Not like those cows over there?" He indicated two girls sitting in the corner, chatting over coffee. They were perhaps eighteen, in denim skirts and jumpers.
"I don't understand," Daniel said carefully.
"They're Fenian sluts," Green said. "They'd shag anybody."
Graham nodded seriously. "You'd need a condom there, they've probably got the pox."
"Because they're Catholics?" Daniel asked.
"It's a known thing," Green said. "So watch it."
"But how do you know I'm not a Catholic?"
Graham said, "Well, you've got a Yorkshire accent." He roared with laughter, then paused. "Here, you're not, are you?"
"What the hell has it got to do with you what I am?" Daniel turned and went out, angry and thoroughly depressed.
He walked back to the residence hall and discovered a message for him pinned to the bulletin board. It was from Liam, asking him to get in touch, so he did, and waited, and Liam came back to him half an hour later.
"How's everything?"
Daniel took a deep breath and swallowed his anger. There was no way he could tell Liam what had happened. "Fine, Liam, it's working out very well."
"That's good. Listen, I've a surprise for you. My wee sister, Rosaleen, is in town this weekend, staying with friends. She's a teaching assistant in an infant school. She's coming home Monday, but she's free Sunday night, Daniel, and a charmer. She'd love to meet you."
"And I'd love to meet her. Let's make it at my residence hall since we've never met, that's the easiest. I'll give you my verdict."
"And I'd love to meet her. Let's make it at my residence hall since we've never met, that's the easiest. I'll give you my verdict."
And she was a charmer, young and pretty, with black hair, reminding him totally of the dark Rosaleen of Irish legend. They called his room to tell him he had a visitor, but, as he was going downstairs, he knew it must be her the first time he saw her. She carried an umbrella, for it was raining outside, and wore a dark blue overcoat over a dress and ankle boots, a bag hanging by a strap from her left shoulder.
She smiled as he took her hand and reached up to kiss his cheek. "It's so grand to meet you, Daniel."
The only fly in the ointment were Green and Graham, who appeared from the common room at that moment. They looked astounded. "What's this, Holley, where have you been hiding it?"
Obviously the worse for drink again, and he took her hand. "Come on, Rosaleen, we'll go down the road and have a bite to eat."
As they wandered out, behind them Green said, "Rosaleen, did you hear that? She's a fucking Fenian."
Daniel started to turn, and she pulled him around. "Never mind them, they're just Protestant shites that can't keep their gobs shut."
She was calmly fierce, so he gave in, offered his arm, and they went down the road together. "Where would you like to go?"
"Oh, fish-and-chips in a cafe will do me fine, with a cup of tea, and you can tell me all about yourself."
They spent two hours enjoying the simple meal and discovering each other. He was extolling the joys of Wharfedale in the West Riding of Yorkshire, she the beauty of the South Armagh countryside, and they vowed to exchange visits. It was ten o'clock when they left. The rain had stopped, but the streets were Sunday-night empty.
"If we walk back to my residence hall, I could call a taxi," he said.
"Belfast taxis anytime of night cost a fortune, and that's when you can get one. It's not all that far to where I'm staying, fifteen minutes." She laughed. "Well, maybe twenty."
"Nothing at all," he said, offered her his arm. They waited for a white van that had been parked across the street to start up and drive past them, and then they began to walk.
It began to rain again, and she got the umbrella up, laughing, and they hurried on, and there was only the odd car passing, and then nothing, as they turned into an empty street, its shops locked up, with their lights on, and bare of parked cars, a police regulation to discourage bombers. A white van-was it the same one?-eased out of a street behind them, passed, and then braked, the driver and his passenger wearing black hoods. The rear doors burst open, and two more men jumped out wearing hoods, one of them holding a revolver.
Rosaleen cried out, and Daniel closed in on the man holding the revolver, grabbing for it with one hand and, in the struggle, tearing off the hood, revealing Green. Daniel shoved him away, still trying to wrench the weapon from Green's grasp, but another man had run around the van and grabbed him from behind.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Daniel shouted as he struggled, but Green, laughing madly, cried, "I'll tell you what we're doing, you fugger. We're Red Hand Commandos, and we're going to teach you and that Fenian bitch some manners."
Behind him, Green struggled to force Rosaleen into the back of the van, and Daniel heard it and her cry of despair, and then Green reversed his grip on the gun and struck Daniel a heavy blow across the side of the head, and that was the end of it.
Daniel came to in subdued darkness, his head throbbing and matted with blood, and discovered that he was in the back of the van, street light filtering in from the windscreen. He tried to sit up and found that his wrists had been tied in front of him with some rough cord. Raising his hands, he could see that the knot was large and had obviously been done in a hurry. He had no difficulty in getting his teeth into it and was free in a couple of minutes.
Heavy rain drummed on the roof, and he slid to the rear and pushed open the doors with his feet, aware of the van's tool kit to one side. He opened it and found a tire iron. He hefted it in his hand for a moment, then got out.
He was in a cobbled courtyard, a wide gate behind him standing open, a streetlight beyond showing old and towering warehouses. He turned and found a four-story building. A light over a large painted sign revealed "Bagley Ironworks, White Lane, Belfast." The whole place looked old and decrepit, but there was a dim light inside, and he went up some stone steps and pushed the door open.
There were workbenches, a jumble of machinery, hoists hanging from above, rain drifting in, and a woman crying, then begging and pleading. He stood there frozen. Then she screamed, and somebody shouted, "Be quiet, you bitch," and there was the sound of a heavy blow.
As he started upstairs, the tire iron ready in his hand, he heard a sudden, desperate cry. "No, please, not that."
"Shut your gob" was followed by sustained blows, and a voice saying, "Stop it, you bugger, you'll kill her."
Daniel reached the top of the stairs and found the door half open. Green was sitting at a table, an open whiskey bottle beside him, fiddling with the Smith amp; Wesson. A door was open behind him, and suddenly it seemed very quiet.
A voice said, "Jesus, you fool, you have killed her."
Green turned to the open door. Daniel lurched forward and smashed him across the skull with the tire iron, then picked up the revolver just as Graham appeared in the doorway and shot him in the heart at point-blank range. As Graham was hurled backwards, Daniel took two quick paces forward and shot the next man he saw in the back of the head as the man started to turn.
The fourth man was old and wizened and shaking in terror. "For pity's sake, don't, I never laid a finger on her."
"Then why's your belt undone and your fly open, you lying bastard?" Daniel stepped close and put a bullet between the old man's eyes.
The sight of Rosaleen now was something that would stay with him always and change his life forever, make him a different man, for dead she was, beyond any doubt, and lying on what was presumably some janitor's bed. He found an old rug to cover her broken and defiled body.
He went back into the other room and he heard a moan. Green was stirring, and, almost without thinking about it, Daniel shot him in the head. He picked up the open bottle of whiskey, raised it, swallowed some down, and emptied the rest of it over Green's corpse.
"You Prod bastard, Green," he said. "Well, I'm a Prod bastard, too."
Looking around, he realized the place must have been an office of sorts in its day. There was a wall phone by the far door, and he went and tried it and, by some miracle, it still worked, so he did the obvious thing and called Liam.
Liam called back surprisingly quickly, for once. "Now then, Daniel, how are things going with you and Rosaleen?"
And Daniel told him.
He was sitting at the table, clutching the revolver, the blood oozing from the side of his skull, when Liam arrived almost an hour later, patted Daniel on the shoulder, and went straight into the janitor's room. When he came out, the look on his face was terrible to see.
There were half a dozen hard-looking men with him and two paramedics in green. Liam kicked Green's corpse, and said, "Get rid of this rubbish and his pals. Round the back in the river will do." He eased the gun from Daniel's grip. "I'll have that now, son."
"I couldn't save her, Liam."
"You did your best. I'd say four kills is a remarkable number for a beginner."
"And you're an expert, so you would know?"
"That's right, cousin. I've been with the Provisional IRA since the beginning. Red Hand Commandos are Protestants closely linked to the UVF. We'll make them pay."