Woody was reading the morning papers when the telephone rang. As usual he’d started going through the tabloids first, and on the desk in front of him he’d opened the Sun and the Daily Mirror. Both had used pictures of the aftermath of the police-station bombing. The Sun had the better photographs but the Mirror had the edge when it came to eye-witness accounts. He reached for Today as he answered the phone.

‘Mr Wood?’ asked a voice that Woody didn’t recognise.

‘Yes?’

‘It is Nguyen Ngoc Minh. I came to your office three days ago.’

‘I remember,’ said Woody. The Chinaman. He flicked through Today. Same pictures as the Sun, more or less. Plus a line drawing of the inside of a booby-trapped bomb, a Blue Peter do-it-yourself guide for amateurs to follow. And here’s one I exploded earlier, thought Woody with a wry smile. ‘How can I help you?’

‘You have seen the newspapers today?’

‘The bombing?’

‘These people must be stopped, Mr Wood.’ Woody was only half listening to the man, he had a sickening feeling that he knew where the conversation was heading. Would the paper offer the reward? Would the paper put pressure on the police? The army? The Government? Woody didn’t want to be rude to the old man but he wasn’t prepared to be used as the paper’s agony aunt. Not on a freelance’s pay, anyway. He thought of giving The Chinaman the phone number for Today. He began turning the pages looking for the number.

‘Mr Wood?’

‘Yes?’

‘You said that you would help me.’

‘Well . . .’ said Woody, about to back-pedal while he hunted frantically for Today’s telephone number.

‘I want to speak to somebody at the IRA. Do you know anybody that would talk to me?’

Woody stopped turning the pages of the newspaper.

‘What are you thinking of doing?’ he asked suspiciously, scenting a possible story.

‘I want to talk to somebody in the IRA, that is all.’

‘I don’t think they’ll help you, I really don’t. And it might backfire.’

‘Backfire? I do not understand.’

‘They are dangerous men, if they thought you were a threat to them, or even just a nuisance, there’s a good chance they’d hurt you.’

‘All I want to do is to talk to them.’

Woody sighed. ‘OK, for a start you don’t want to talk to the IRA. You’d be better off trying Sinn Fein, that’s the political wing of the organisation. The Sinn Fein spokesmen are well-known.’

‘Could you give me some names, and tell me where I might find them?’

Woody looked at the photographs of smashed brickwork, broken glass and misshapen metal. What the hell, he thought. Why not?

‘I’ll have to call you back, give me your number.’

‘I gave you before.’

‘I know, but I’m using a different notebook now.’

Nguyen read out the figures slowly, and Woody promised to ring him back later in the day. He was about to go over to the cuttings library but had second thoughts and instead decided to call one of the paper’s Belfast stringers. Might as well get it from the horse’s mouth. For a change the stringer, Pat Quigley, was helpful, sober and in his office, a hell of an unusual combination and Woody took full advantage of it. He gave Woody three names, potted biographies, where they lived, and contact phone numbers, and told him a foul joke involving two nuns and a bar of soap from which Woody deduced that the man wasn’t a Catholic.