work. Others said they had been staying on the Belgrave Road and had got drunk at a local pub (which, at any rate, had elements of the truth). They all offered false names – Dolours stuck with her pseudonym Una Devlin – and denied that they knew one another. Asked about the bombs, they responded with sullen silence. (What the authorities did not know then but would learn later was that one member of the group – an eleventh bomber – was missing. He had slipped away before the others were arrested at the airport, and gone to ground in London. He has never been identified or captured.)
‘I don’t intend to tell you anything,’ Marian Price said when she was questioned by a senior police officer. ‘You’ve no right to keep me here.’ She continued to stonewall, refusing to say a thing. It was already after 2 p.m., and the detectives knew they were running out of time. They pressed Marian about where the other bombs were, but she would not say. She wore a locket around her neck, and she kept putting it in her mouth and chewing on it anxiously. It suddenly occurred to the chief inspector who was interviewing her that the locket might contain some kind of poison, like a cyanide pill. He snatched it from her, only to see that it was a crucifix. His frustration growing, the inspector called her ‘an evil little maniac’ and said she would not be seeing the sunshine again for some time.
But Marian Price said nothing. There was something robotic, almost trance-like, about her demeanour, and that of her fellow bombers. The detectives began to wonder if they had undergone some instruction in how to resist interrogation. They would fix their eyes on an object and just stare at it, as if hypnotised, refusing to say a thing. Then, just before 3 p.m., Marian raised her wrist and looked pointedly at her watch.
In a quiet fury, the chief inspector said, ‘Am I intended to gather that the timing on the other bombs has just expired?’
Marian Price just smiled.
In Whitehall, people were ambling back from lunchtime in the pleasant weather when the police finally discovered the Hillman Hunter parked in front of the army recruiting centre. The officers stormed into the surrounding buildings, clearing everybody out. With five minutes to go before detonation, an explosives expert from the Royal Army Ordnance Corps broke a window and climbed into the car, then attempted to disarm the device. But there wasn’t time now, and he scrambled out. Using a hook attached to a long line, he snagged the detonating cord connecting the timer to the explosives, then took cover around the corner of a building and started to pull. The resistance was significant, so he asked a sergeant who was with him for help. The two of them had just started pulling on the cord again when the timer’s hand reached its terminus.
The Hillman split apart, ripped open by a sheet of flame that rose forty feet in the air. There was a dull thud, and a reverberation so strong that it lifted people in the surrounding area clean off the pavement. Windows shattered in the offices and shops for a quarter of a mile around. The blast blew the helmets off the policemen’s heads and sent tiny missiles of glass and metal whizzing in every direction.
A sooty mushroom cloud rose above the street, and acrid smoke billowed among the buildings. A gas main ruptured, spewing more smoke and starting a blaze as firemen arrived and began dragging hoses through the carnage. People staggered about, dazed, their skin lacerated by glass. Dozens of cars were hollowed out and twisted up like crumpled paper.
The clap of the blast echoed throughout central London. On Dean Stanley Street, authorities had just managed to find and dismantle the third bomb, in the Vauxhall Viva, in front of the British Forces Broadcasting Service building. But by the time police had identified the car at the Old Bailey, it was too late. An officer ran towards the school bus and shouted at the children who had just got off, telling them to run for their lives. They did, screaming and shouting, hurrying around a corner for cover.
One of the London bombs explodes, Whitehall, 8 March 1973 (G/M/Camera Press/Redux)
A police photographer was taking pictures of the car when suddenly he was hurled across the street. The blast was enormous. The façade of the George pub was torn away, exposing