I told you Mad Frank Marby was in town, right? Marby’s this guy from Athlone with a reputation for pointless torture. I told you he looked like that bad bastard Fred West; big kick-your-cunt-in face. We had never heard of Fred West back then even though he must have been at it at the time, fucking scum, torturing young girls. That would never have happened under the Ra’s remit. Things were safer, on the whole. If you stole a car you got kneecapped. Never mind raping some poor young bird and burying her under your patio. But Marby’s in town because an informer has been uncovered in the ranks of the FSV and a bunch of the boys had let the top rank of the Ra know. They hadn’t blown the whistle yet but they had transferred over to the Ra and had let them know what was going on. It was starting to look like the FSV was a front organisation set up by Special Branch. The whole fucking edifice was riddled with spies and informers. That’s the word Mack used when we had a briefing about the situation.

We’re at a call house in the Ardoyne, a foul dump of a place. The whole fucking edifice, Mack says, is rotten. The entire fucking structure is riddled, he says. But this presents us with a great opportunity. For information. How do we know it’s not a set-up? Big Bik McQuillan says to him. How do we know, if this fucking thing is as riddled as you say, that this isn’t some attempt to set us all up? The information is good, Mack says. The information is quality. We have our own sources, he says to us. We have our own confirmed channels. This isn’t a one-way fucking street, he says to us.

So what’s the game? Mad Frank Marby says. The game is this, Mack says, and he introduces two guys that have come over to the Ra from the FSV, and one of them is Jimmy McNulty, the brother of Rab and Joe McNulty, who were taken out by the Ra over false claims to the Europa bombing. I can see he knows who I am. That’s fucking one of the McNulty boys, Barney whispers to me.

I’m Jimmy McNulty, he says, and this is Pat Allardyce. I’m aware that there is some bad blood between us and some people in this room, he says. I lost my two brothers over it but we’re all on the same side. Always were. There was just some dispute over tactics.