accede to their demands and send them back home to serve their sentences there or they would die of starvation and their bodies would be shipped to Belfast for burial: ‘We will be back in Northern Ireland one way or the other by the New Year.’
13
The Toy Salesman
Arthur McAllister was a toy salesman. He rented a flat on the ground floor of an elegant brick home on Myrtlefield Park, in a middle-class neighbourhood on the outskirts of Belfast. Even at the height of the Troubles, it could occasionally seem, in the leafier suburbs, that sectarian strife and paramilitary gun battles were chiefly a working-class phenomenon, one that seldom touched the area’s more stable, well-heeled precincts. McAllister’s flat was fronted by a lattice of ivy and surrounded by old trees and a gracious lawn. Each morning, he would leave the house carrying a case full of toy samples and catalogues. He would climb into his car and crisscross the greater Belfast area, popping into shops to see if he might interest the proprietors in his wares. He was a small, punctilious man, always clean-shaven, his hair carefully trimmed. He dressed in a manner that might have seemed unnecessarily formal for his chosen line of work: McAllister was ultimately just a door-to-door salesman, but when he made his rounds, he looked like a banker, attired in a three-piece suit.
One morning in the spring of 1974, the quiet of the suburban neighbourhood was ruptured when a convoy of police cars and armoured vehicles coursed through the streets and came to an abrupt halt right outside the house on Myrtlefield Park. The British Army had been staking out the property. In fact, a soldier dressed in camouflage had spent the previous night hiding in a rhododendron bush in the front garden. The lookout was in position so long that his fellow soldiers worried he might not have enough to eat. An effort to subtly resupply him had gone awry when someone walked by with an order of fish and chips but accidentally threw the food into the wrong bush.
The target of this surveillance, and of the morning raid, was the toy salesman himself. As the vehicles screeched into place, soldiers and police stormed the house, where they found McAllister and shoved him against a wall. With great indignation, he protested his innocence and expressed his outrage that the authorities might barge into the home of a blameless civilian. But the officials did not appear to believe that he was actually a toy salesman, or even that his name was McAllister.
‘Come on, Darkie,’ one of the officers said. ‘You’ve had a long enough run.’
After he escaped from Long Kesh in the rubbish lorry, Brendan Hughes had eventually managed to hitch a ride from a vanful of gypsies, and then another from a driver who turned out to be English. Sitting in the passenger seat, it occurred to Hughes that the Englishman might be an off-duty guard from the very prison from which he happened to have just escaped. But if the man was a Long Kesh employee, he never figured out the identity of his hitchhiker. Hughes got as far as Newry, where he was able to access some money that he had stashed away for this type of eventuality. From there, he took a taxi across the border to Dundalk.
As soon as he was safe in the Republic, Hughes started to feel the tug of Belfast. Having lost months behind the wire at Long Kesh, he was eager to get back to running operations, but he knew that he could not return to his old patch of West Belfast. It was too hot, and he was too known. If his arrest with Adams the previous summer had marked a colossal success for the authorities, his escape was an even more colossal embarrassment. The only way for Hughes to safely return to Belfast would be to go incognito. So he decided to forge a new identity. He rented the property on Myrtlefield Park and began to construct an alter ego, adopting the name Arthur McAllister, shaving off his trademark moustache, cutting and dyeing his hair, and endeavouring to appear the very opposite of the scruffy lout the police had photographed after his arrest with Adams in the Falls. Arthur McAllister was a real person, or had been – he had died as an infant but would have been about Brendan’s age. By using this name and constructing a personality around it, Hughes had created what