For years the Church of Ireland had jeered at the Presbyterian’s unrelenting nature, their extremes of evangelism, their tribal fear of change. The lowly Presbyterian that had been the cohort of the Fenian in ’98. In some quarters they were even seen as a radical sect who had again stirred up revolution among the more conservative Roman Catholics. But now the Church of Ireland, too, was a tribe cast out of the land. Death chased them through the shadows. Vodka could not stop it. The minute he entered the station he would find the whiff in the air. The male smell of fear. The smell was there before you reached the door. A yard from the door the stench began. And mixed with it were other odours: the metallic smell from the clips of bullets, magazine oil, poster paint, shoe polish, sweat, and then the scent of male flesh exposed to overpowering heat that came from hundreds of lights. It was always dark in there. There were few windows. And as the day dragged on, even while rain fell, the station would at its core remain intolerably dry. The long hours of dryness were debilitating.

Feet, tonsils and the upper arms would grow heavy.

But fear kept the policemen agile. When they lifted their SRN rifles their arms would grow light.

Still the dryness stayed in the air. Everyone was afraid to leave the station. Even the godless new recruits, joining now in huge numbers because of the pay, crowded round their seniors in friendly banter. They felt trapped within a province that had grown small as a townland. Over short distances they always went by car. The smell went with them. No policeman sat on a bicycle in the province anymore. In four years their wages practically doubled. Tall fences went up outside the existing walls that surrounded each police station. This had been one of Matti Bonner’s last jobs. And even he must have felt it – the sensation of something burning, the sensation of something that was eating up all the oxygen in the air. And perhaps, since he had only a few weeks to live, Matti Bonner may have felt some empathy between himself and these men in olive green – Protestant Zionists some, successful terrorists others; gentlemen who hallucinated, labourers, holy crusaders, farmers’ sons. It was Matti Bonner, the Sergeant’s best man, who, working for a contractor from Enniskillen, helped fence them in.