Michael Agnew’s case files

Michael Agnew’s case files are both working legal records and a counter-record of policing: they preserve accounts and images that official descriptions of criminal cases can leave out. Their contents become visible to Cushla Lavery when she reads a folder in Michael’s flat, where statements, photographs, and the boys’ own accounts document alleged mistreatment in custody. The files also connect his legal work to arguments over the fairness of the courts and, after his death, to Cushla’s growing uncertainty about what she knows of his cases.

A lawyer’s working records

The files first appear as part of the clutter of Michael’s professional life. At his flat, folders and ring binders sit among cups and saucers, papers, and bottles. Cushla knows that he has legal work to do, but the records are not initially described in detail. Their ordinary, accumulated presence gives them the look of ongoing work rather than a single archive assembled for display.

At dinner, Cushla asks whether the folders contain the disturbing material she has encountered in court. Michael tells her that some of them do. His answer is brief, but it changes the meaning of the papers she has seen around him: they hold evidence concerning actual cases, not merely the background documents of a lawyer’s routine. The contrast between domestic surroundings and the gravity of the work continues when Cushla later enters his flat and finds the records laid out on the dining table.

The files belong to a legal practice conducted amid disputes about the courts themselves. Michael argues that Diplock courts, which sit without juries, are unfair and would not be accepted elsewhere in the United Kingdom or in a civilised country. At another dinner, Victor dismisses Republican prisoners’ objections to the system, while Michael insists that the system treats them unfairly and argues that political circumstances contribute to many young people getting into trouble. The case files give material weight to that position: they preserve evidence against which polished public descriptions of policing can be tested.

What one folder records

The folder Cushla opens is identified as a brutality case. A slip on the thick stack bears the names Kelly, McAleavey, and Coyle. Inside are copies of statements the young men refused to sign, police mugshots, and accounts written by each boy about arrest and custody. The documents record the sequence of their treatment, including forced entry, identification procedures, hooding, and interrogation. Their arrangement makes separate forms of evidence legible together: the boys’ written accounts sit alongside official images and records of their condition.

The photographs have a different force from the written material. The mugshots are grainy, and the young men appear frightened and depleted. Other photographs document injuries sustained in custody. Cushla cannot at first make sense of one close-up image; she turns it over and changes its orientation before understanding what it shows. The evidence is difficult to absorb, and she responds by putting the image face down and pouring more whiskey. The scene establishes the records’ importance without making them easy to read: evidence can be preserved and still resist comprehension, particularly for the person encountering it outside the routines of legal work.

The boys’ accounts also describe the identification procedure. A blanket is held in front of a woman while she calls out the positions of those in the lineup. The detail sits beside the accounts of arrest and interrogation, showing how a sequence of procedures can become part of a case record. Michael’s files thus retain the experiences that would otherwise be filtered through the language of charges, testimony, and courtroom argument. For Cushla, their evidentiary force is personal as well as professional: she is reading material connected to the work of someone with whom she is having a secret relationship.

The gap between public accounts and evidence

Michael’s criticism of official presentation extends beyond court procedure. He describes a police film called Policeday as propaganda intended to make the RUC appear impartial. Its comic scenes of officers chasing sheep, a man seeking directions in a language they do not understand, and a stylised interrogation stand in sharp contrast to the custody evidence preserved in his files. The records do not simply support a general disagreement about policing; they offer case-specific material against which reassuring public images can be judged.

That contrast also explains why Michael’s position is contested at the dinner table. Victor describes prisoners as gunmen and bombers who complain about unfair treatment, and dismisses them in contemptuous terms. Michael objects that the system itself is unjust. The folders give a concrete dimension to the argument: within them are refused statements, accounts by the boys, and photographs documenting mistreatment. They do not erase the accusations or establish that every defendant is innocent. Rather, they show why the circumstances of arrest and custody matter to the reliability and fairness of legal proceedings.

The Coyle connection and Tommy’s case

A later conversation brings the name Coyle into the question of what the files mean for people caught in the system. Michael tells Cushla that Mrs Coyle’s son has been identified in a lineup, although he says the young man did nothing. The boy has been remanded alongside men who are involved in the activities under investigation and is refusing to recognise the court in solidarity with them. Michael says he could help if the young man accepted a solicitor’s services, but also calls his refusal foolish. The exchange presents legal help as available but conditional on a defendant’s willingness to participate in a process he distrusts.

The file Cushla reads contains the name Coyle, but the narrative does not explicitly identify that folder as Mrs Coyle’s son’s case. The later conversation nevertheless gives the name a troubling resonance: the earlier evidence of custody and identification now sits beside a particular family’s fear that a young man may be drawn into a case through a lineup and then refuse the legal assistance Michael offers. The file’s documentary detail and Michael’s account of the case remain related without being made interchangeable.

Tommy McGeown’s trial offers another view of the consequences of refusing the court, though the evidence does not establish that Tommy’s case is the brutality file Cushla read. A newspaper report says that Tommy refused to recognise the court, offered no defence, and answered no questions; he was convicted on evidence described as forensic, circumstantial, and damning. Cushla imagines how he might have encountered Michael: Tommy had been working on a house opposite Michael’s, and Michael invited him in for tea when it began to rain. A photograph of Michael in legal dress may have led Tommy to mistake him for a judge. This remains Cushla’s reconstruction, not a fact established by the files, but it places the legal record beside the fragile human circumstances from which a case can begin.

Discovery, uncertainty, and aftermath

Cushla’s discovery changes the files from an abstraction into evidence she has personally seen. She tries to put the papers back as she found them, then smokes by the window and returns to Michael’s chair. She is unsettled not only by the folder but by the possibility of what the others contain. Later, after Michael has been killed in what a newspaper describes as bearing the hallmarks of an IRA assassination, she recalls that she looked in only one folder, the brutality case, while he had told her that he took on many kinds of work. She cannot know what was in the remaining records, or whether any of it bears on his death.

The files consequently carry two kinds of uncertainty. As legal records, they preserve material that challenges simplified accounts of policing and detention; as objects in Cushla’s story, they reveal only a portion of Michael’s professional world. The names on a folder, the refused statements, and the boys’ accounts make hidden experiences available for scrutiny, but they do not provide Cushla with a complete explanation of the cases or of Michael himself. Their significance lies in that tension: they make evidence visible while leaving the larger record unfinished.