to meet him outside, but because the lorry had taken so much longer than expected on its rounds, Hughes had apparently missed the rendezvous, and the car wasn’t there. Nor was this the kind of town where Hughes might just pop into the local pub, like the Magnificent Seven after they escaped from the Maidstone, and expect the patrons to donate a change of clothes and a getaway car. On the contrary, Hughes now found himself in the middle of a loyalist area. Not only was this hostile territory, but he had not put enough distance between himself and Long Kesh. As soon as they realised he was missing at the head count, the whole surrounding area would be flooded with troops. He had to get to the Republic. He was now the most wanted man in Northern Ireland, and he didn’t have much time.
Michael Mansfield was sitting in the library on the top floor of the Old Bailey when the bomb detonated outside. A huge boom echoed below, and Mansfield was showered with broken glass. At thirty-two, Mansfield was an ambitious, slightly flamboyant English lawyer, with floppy hair and a sonorous voice. He had recently scored his first major legal triumph, in a months-long trial, at the Old Bailey, of the so-called Angry Brigade, a group of homegrown British anarchists who had tried to spark worldwide revolution by planting bombs in the homes of Conservative ministers. Mansfield’s client in that case, a young woman named Angela Weir, was acquitted. The case against her turned on handwriting evidence, and Mansfield was able, through his examination, to thoroughly discredit the government’s experts. He had become politically radical as a student, and found that he was drawn to cases in which difficult questions were raised, questions about the nature of authoritarian power and resistance. With the money he made from the Angry Brigade case, Mansfield bought a car – a little secondhand Triumph 2000.
Because of the rail strike, Mansfield drove to work on the day of the bombing. He was running late and was worried about finding a parking space, but he discovered that parking restrictions had been waived, so he thought he might be able to find a spot right by the main entrance of the Old Bailey. He was lucky: there was one empty space, not far from a green Ford Cortina.
Mansfield was not seriously injured when the bomb exploded, but the Triumph was ripped apart. Not long afterwards, Mansfield was asked if he would like to take on the case of the very people who had blown it up, the young Irish bombers Dolours and Marian Price. A long tradition existed in the legal profession of enterprising litigators taking on notorious clients, not least because the exposure often raised the profile of their practice. But the IRA bombing was considered such a deep affront to London that many established lawyers would not take the case, on principle.
Mansfield would. He was very curious to meet the sisters. When he did, he was struck immediately by their beauty and by the intensity of their commitment. They sat balled up on plastic chairs, hugging their knees, and told him about the abuses of Catholics in the North, about internment, about Bloody Sunday. They recalled being pummelled by the loyalist mob at Burntollet Bridge. Mansfield wasn’t that much older than they were. He prided himself on his radical politics, but he had chosen to pursue those politics through the less-than-revolutionary vocation of the law. It struck him that the Price sisters had chosen a different sort of life, a life that was truly ‘on the edge’.
Dolours and Marian were charged, along with the eight others who had been captured, with conspiring to cause ‘an explosion of a nature likely to endanger life’. Normally, there would be an obvious venue for such a trial: the Old Bailey. But the building was still being repaired after the bombing, and the government wanted to fast-track the proceedings. Besides, it might have been construed as prejudicial to try a group of defendants in a courthouse on charges of endeavouring to destroy that very courthouse. So the proceedings, which commenced in the autumn of 1973, were relocated to the Great Hall of Winchester Castle, an imposing thirteenth-century chamber of medieval stone, marble columns and stained glass. It was in this same room that Sir Walter Raleigh was found guilty of treason in 1603, for plotting to overthrow King James I. An enormous oak replica of the surface of