All in the line of duty

Top crime correspondent Jeff Edwards tells the personal story of a friend - a serving Royal Ulster Constabulary officer - who has spent his career dodging death and terrorism

IT'S just a plain blue flower vase that cost less than a fiver when it was new 20 years ago.

But for Bill Mac of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, it's a symbol of his determination that his name will never be entered in the Those Who Fell book of remembrance.

To Bill, the vase is as vital a part of his survival pack as his bullet proof vest or the pistol he straps to his side every day.

It stands on a table near the front window of the house he shares with his wife Annie in the suburbs of Belfast. If you know where to look you can see it from the street.

Every time Bill comes home from duty he does two things. First he rings Annie to check if everything is OK and to say that he's on his way.

The second happens as he approaches his own driveway. As he slows down he checks to see if the vase is in the window.

If it's not he knows his worst nightmare has happened. There are terrorists in his house waiting to kill him and his wife has moved the vase to let him know.

If that happens he knows what he must do. He will drive quickly away, making contact with his HQ.

The RUC has plans to deal with such situations, but the details must remain secret.

I know these things because Bill and Annie Mac are friends of mine. Those are not their real names, but they are real people.

You will understand that I can't tell you their real names because if I did I could be condemning them to a violent death.

Even their neighbours, the teachers at their children's school, the landlord of the local pub and the committee at their golf club, don't know what Bill does for a living.

That's the way thousands of members of the RUC have lived their lives for nearly 30 years.

According to Bill, the difference between living and dying as a police officer in Northern Ireland is normally down to attention to the small details.

He said: "In my mind I can see all the faces of the friends who have died. Sometimes it was beyond their control, but too often it was a lack of attention to detail.

"We all have our routines. Check, check, and check again. It gets tedious and some people get lazy, they get careless. For most of them nothing scary has ever happened.

"They forget that death only happens to you once. When it comes, it comes like a thunderbolt. Bang!, and that's it, lights out. And too many times it has happened to people who got lazy, relaxed their guard.

"Heaven must be full of RUC officers saying: 'You know, I wouldn't be here if only I'd been a bit more careful'.""

We were sitting in Bill's front room when I mentioned the vase.

He said: "When we were courting, I told Annie that if she was going to marry an RUC man she'd better realise that she could suddenly be widowed one day.

"Worse, it could happen right before her eyes. It's happened to people I've known - shot dead right in front of their wives and children in their own living room by gunman who had forced their way in and were waiting for the old man to come in.

"I wasn't going to have that happen to me. So we decided we needed some kind of signal to tell me if the coast was clear.

"We thought of several ideas. Lights on or off, or curtains drawn or open. But I thought that if it was a smart Provie hi-jacked my house and family, he might tumble that there was some sort of code.

"So we settled on the vase. It stands next to the phone. If I ring and they are there, they'll expect her to answer the phone. In her nervousness she'll knock the vase off its perch and it'll smash on the floor.

"It'll break all right. I've made sure of that. It would be no good if stayed in one piece and my executioner picked it up and put it back on the table.

"You see, we deliberately broke it in the first place, then glued it back together using a very small amount of glue. One little knock and it will fall apart."

It is attention to detail like this that makes the difference between living and dying."

It's that kind of meticulous care which he says has saved him from joining the list of the 199 RUC officers and the 102 reservists murdered since 1969.

I first met him a few years ago on holiday on a quiet Greek island. He and Annie had the apartment next to mine. I knew they were from Northern Ireland, of course. But he didn't tell me he was a cop for days.

Then, one night of many beers, the jukebox in the bar started playing the old Bee Gees hit Staying Alive.

Billy told me it was favourite song. He said: "It's my theme tune." Then he confided in me about his job.

He told me of the routines he had to stick to. Checking under the car every day for magnetic mines. Checking the garden gate for a length of fishing line linked to a bomb in the hedge.

Cleaning and dry firing his gun every day. Wearing it every time he went out, even if it was only down to the corner shop for a pint of milk.

"Do you know how many bobbies have died because they didn't bother to take their gun when they popped out to post a letter? More than a few, I can tell you.""

He told me about the time just after they got married that Annie had washed his RUC uniform shirt and hung them on the garden line to dry.

He said: "I ran out and snatched them off the pegs. In the kitchen I made light of it and asked her if she was seeing another man and was she trying to get me bumped off. But I was serious.

"I told her it only needed the wrong someone to see those strides hung out to dry and PIRA will have have me tatey bread for sure. RUC men have died over mistakes smaller than that one."

"It's a strange life. Imagine going to a football match on your day off and seeing mates of yours there who are on duty and in uniform and they don't say hello and shake your hand because it could be spotted by the wrong man in the crowd who marks you down as a copper and follows you home. That's what we do."

After that holiday we stayed firm friends. Many times since Bill and Annie have made trips to stay with me in England.

It's one of the few times he can let his guard relax - and I'm the only long-standing friend he's got who is not a fellow cop.

Few RUC officers make friends outside 'their profession. They can't take the risk. Likewise, their wives have few friends who aren't cops' wives.

Even the people where Annie works don't know her husband is a policeman.

She said: "I am as surveillance-conscious as Bill. There have been days when I thought I've been being followed. I end up driving round the roundabout five times to see if someone is on my tail.

"On one occasion I got so convinced I was being tailed I actually left my car at a station, got a train in the wrong direction, and then got a cab to my mother's house and another one home later.

"By the time I picked my car up the following day it had cost me pounds 25 in taxi fares. I don't even know if I was being followed, but once the seed of doubt was sown, what could I do?"I know an RUC widow whose husband was killed because she let slip he was a policeman to a woman she met at work. Someone gossipped and someone talked to someone else and that's how it starts.

"Some weeks after he was murdered she told me that she thought she had been followed. But she dismissed it, thought she was imagining things. She never said anything to her husband.

"They put a bomb under his car. That was that."

Bill is cautiously optimistic about the peace process, but he said: "A Yes vote will not make any difference to the way RUC officers live for years to come.

"There's too many bad bastards out there, too many guns, too many scores to settle. It's too ingrained in too many people.

"I've been involved in putting away some of the worst of the worst. If we had peace guaranteed tomorrow I could never relax. Supposing if, in 10 years time, one of those men I helped jail spotted me somewhere and followed me.

"Could I be sure that just because we had peace that he wouldn't come and shoot me anyway, just for old time's sake?

"This is the way I am living because if I don't then it's the way I'm dying."

Mistake nearly cost my life

STEVE McAllister has identified the little mistake that nearly cost him his life. In 1979 he was an RUC reservist. There was a petrol shortage and the security forces were given special fuel coupons.

One January evening he stopped to buy petrol near the print plant in Belfast's Donegall Street where he worked as a compositor.

He had just finished his shift at Musgrave Street police station and was still wearing his green uniform trousers.

A few days later two assassins lay in wait for him as he left work.

As he got in his car two shotgun blasts were fired through his windscreen and hit him in the face.

Five bullets from a .45 special followed, all five went into the car but missed him by inches.

Despite his wounds, Steve stayed conscious and manged to run back into the printing works. His attackers fled.

Hundreds of pellets tore off part of his nose, a chunk of his ear, knocked out his front teeth and left his face a bloody mess.

The next day while lying in the Royal Victoria Hospital the gunmen came to finish him off.

Two of them, dressed as hospital orderlies, entered the corridor to his ward, but his guards chased them off.

Steve was released from hospital and went back to work. Two months later, while driving, he became convinced he was being followed by gunmen.

He had an anxiety attack and blacked out. He awoke on his way back to hospital again after his car rammed into the back of another vehicle.

Steve would not give up. But the scores of pellets still embedded in his face were still there. In 1990 some of them worked their way into his left eye, destroying the retina. His right eye had already been badly damaged in the shooting attack.

Now 80 per cent of his sight has gone. He is registered blind and carries a white stick.

He said: "I am sure it was petrol station incident that gave me away. Someone twigged I was RUC Reserve and where I worked.

"I never saw the attack coming. I was looking down at something on the passenger seat next to me when the first shot came through the screen.

"I thought someone had thrown a brick. Then the second shot hit me.

"My head snapped back but I was still conscious. That saved my life.

"I knew I had to run. I scrambled out just as the one with the handgun opened fire. It spoiled his aim.

"If he'd hit me that would have been curtains.

"One shell went through the bonnet and cracked the engine block. The others just missed me." "

Steve is one of the 8,317 RUC officers who have been wounded by terrorists but lived to tell the tale.

He now spents much of his time working with other police officers disabled by terrorists.

He said: "My life was changed irrevocably that day but I know I am lucky compared with many.

"There are men with no legs, men who are in so much pain from their wounds, years on, that they need doses of morphine and pethedine every 30 minutes.

"Any sane person wants to see an end to what we have all endured in the last 29 years.

"Can there ever be a return to 'normal' policing here? I doubt it.

"No matter what, I cannot see a time when the police will go unarmed and be able to live without looking over their shoulder."

Copyright 1998 MGN LTD
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