Northern Spy

Tessa travels to her workplace, the Broadcasting House for the BBC, and notes how Belfast is still under the IRA’s thumb. Their members coerce restaurant and shop owners to give them protection money, fault of which the IRA will ransack their place of business. She enters a meeting with other news editors and correspondents, and they discuss viable topics for their show. They review the case of Cillian Burke, a prominent IRA figure, and his trial, which they assume will fail to produce a conviction. Later, she and Nicholas go over his upcoming interview with Rebecca Main, a justice minister who, despite outwardly claiming the UK will never bend to terrorism, still displays her fears when she wears bulletproof vests on camera. While Rebecca dismisses the divisive nature of asking citizens to spy on their neighbors during the interview, Tessa sees Marian appear on the screen. She is linked to an ongoing investigation for armed robbery.

Tessa rushes to the nearest police station, where she meets Detective Inspector Fenton. He questions her over Marian’s involvement with the IRA, which Tessa denies Marian ever joined. She maintains that Marian was threatened by the IRA to commit a crime for them. DI Fenton does not believe her. In order to incentivize the police to look for her sister not as a terrorist but as an abductee, Tessa lies and says Marian is pregnant.

Tessa returns home, where her mother is bathing Finn. She frets over her son and the persisting dangers of living in Northern Ireland, wishing she could leave. She and her mother discuss her meeting with DI Fenton and talk about the likelihood of Marian being hurt by the IRA. As Tessa nurses her son later that night, she plays back the video of the armed robbery in which Marian took part and wishes she could have been there to help and/or replace her in her abduction so that Marian could rest.

The next morning, Tessa wakes to make herself, Finn, and her mother Dutch pancakes for breakfast. As they sit around the table to eat, her mother announces her plans to visit Eoin Royce, a friend’s son who’d been in the IRA, for advice on how to help Marian. When Tessa voices her doubts about him, her mother claims he’s changed because he’s become a religious person. Tessa points out that religion is at the heart of all their problems, which her mother does not appreciate. As she cleans up breakfast, Tessa thinks of the state of her relationship with Marian since she gave birth to Finn. She noticed a tension when she visited Marian once and believes it was due to what seemed like opposite lifestyles: Tessa was a mother while Marian was having drunken dinner parties with friends in her apartment at night. She decides to visit Templepatrick, where the armed robbery happened.

Tessa drives to Templepatrick and arrives at the service station where the robbery occurred. Despite feeling bewildered by the situation, she makes her way inside and asks one of the employees questions about what happened. The employee doesn’t have much by way of details and cannot confirm how Marian was treated during the robbery, so Tessa leaves. As she drives back, she remembers when she and Marian witnessed the bombing on Elgin Street and how they rushed to help people. When she returns home, she gets a phone call from DI Fenton, asking her to come to the station.

When Tessa arrives at the police station, DI Fenton asks her about Marian’s time working as a paramedic, specifically during a bombing incident at the Lyric. At the time, many of the victims were in critical condition, and Marian chose to save a man first when, typically, paramedics usually start with women. Fenton asks more questions about Marian’s alleged pregnancy, testing the consistency of Tessa’s account. He then asks her about the hidden burner phone they found in her apartment. Tessa wasn’t aware of the phone and desperately tries to find reasons for its existence, but dread and doubt are seeping through. When Fenton then asks her about whether Marian makes any trips, specifically to St. George’s Market, Tessa confirms that she, Marian, and Finn had recently visited it. Fenton tells her a pipe bomb had been found in the market that very day.

After finishing up at the police station, Tessa returns to St. George’s Market, recalling her visit with her son and Marian and how pleasant it had been as she walks around the stalls. Her conversation with Fenton comes to mind, as he told her Marian’s bag was large enough to carry the bomb, and she was most likely using Finn as a cover. Though she didn’t tell him, Tessa remembers that going to the market had been Marian’s idea, and at the time, she had insisted they bring Finn.