The story she told me was this: that she had worked as a whore at the Europa for several year and that it was profitable and safe – at first – and there was a never-ending supply of clients, with members of the press, civil servants, diplomats and international politicians coming and going in those years. There was a circle of girls working there, essentially under the protection of the Brits. Her husband Davy knew nothing about any of this. She says. At first. He had been paying protection money to the IRA in return for being able to trade. His shop was in an area that had fallen under covert IRA control. Kathy mentioned the various diplomats and politicians that she had ‘befriended’ at the Europa and Davy insisted that she bring it up to them. And so she did.

She mentions it to a few people who shrug and say, it’s a problem across the board, there are no-go areas all over Belfast, what do you expect us to do? But she had taken a lover. A man name of Trevor Winter. One of these vague ‘protector of the realm’ types. And Winter says he’ll look into it. That it might be possible to do something, he says. That he would look into what contacts he had on the ground and see whether they couldn’t nudge a few of the necessaries. He acted like he was pulling strings. Like the whole thing was a game with just a few people on each side directing the action. He would get drunk with Kathy in a room at the Europa and he would boast about his contacts in the field. The whole game is rigged, he says to her. The whole game is riddled. The whole game is wriggled.

He gets drunk and he goes on about Control. Control says this. Control says that. Control is in control, he says. What is Control? Kathy says. Control, my dear, he says, Control, my darling girl, is whoever defines the term. Are you talking about psychological warfare? she says to him. If you say so, he says, and he winks and he rolls her top up over her small, perfectly formed tits, like little fucking coloured rosebuds, they were. The whole game is riddled, he says. We have introduced contagions. Pathogens of our own making. Psychopathogens, he says. That’s another word for a Fenian bastard, he says, and we’re flooding the market.

Then, afterward: my husband is being leaned on by the IRA. He has stopped paying their protection money to them out of principle. Principles, Trevor Winter says, and he chokes off a laugh as he lays out a line of coke for each of them in a room with the curtains closed in the spring of 1977. Principles, he says, are the most dangerous contagion of them all.