Rosemary Dye turned into the small sandwich shop to which she always went. She stopped at the door to let a handsome young man in
a green suit pass by. He, struck by the flush of her
face and neck, smiled flirtatiously and held the
door open with a vaguely gallant air. She smirked
happily and stepped under his arm. She turned to
murmur some thanks and stopped existing. The
largest part of one of the glass display cases
1
blasted
in her direction. Though fragmented before it
reached her, the pieces of shrapnel and glass were
still large enough to kill her instantly. […]
The young man who had opened the door for
her – he was thirty-four but still had unlined skin
and thick hair, had always been thought younger than he was but what had irritated him in his
early twenties now delighted
2
him, as he saw his
old schoolfriends married or bald and he could still
comfortably date girls ten years younger than he
was – was also killed, though he took nearly twenty
seconds to stop existing. […] Inside the sandwich
shop (how unglamorous, how untremendous 3
– Northern Ireland has never dealt in epic murder sites)
[…], Kevin McCafferty stopped existing.
[…] So, thus, in short, an intricate, say some,
mix of history, politics, circumstance and ordnance
4
resulted in the detonation of a one-hundred-pound bomb in the enclosed space of the
front part of a small sandwich shop measuring
twenty-two feet by twelve.