Gun Street Girl (11 page)

“Let it sit. Bring her in in a few days or a week or so,” he repeated dutifully, but I could tell he didn't like it.

“Sound good?”

“Can I at least tell the Chief Inspector that we're close to closing the book on this one?”

“Tell him that when you hand in the written progress report.”

“And Lawson and Fletcher?”

“Tell Lawson to dial it down, tell Fletcher to dial it up. She's a police officer not a bloody secretary.”

“OK, cheers, Sean.”

“Cheers, Crabbie, and well done. Case number one nearly under your belt. And it's a murder. Whew. I see Chief Constable in your future.”

And he touched wood to ward off a jinx that might possibly have been impressed by my oracular abilities.

8: POLICE STATION BLUES

Rain and cold. Boredom. And then . . . 180. The pancake flipped. The pancake fell on the fucking floor.

Thatcher
. Thatcher, like Stalin, was making a Five Year Plan . . .

Northern Ireland had been too quiet.
This is the mid-eighties, love. Time to get your handbag swinging and shake things up
.

Sara Prentice gave me the news.

Brriinng. Brriinng
.

Office phone. The direct line.

“Hello, Sean Duffy, Carrickfergus CID.”

“I love hearing you say that. You sound so sexy and official.”

“Sara? What's up? You're not canceling dinner for tonight, are you?”

“No way. I'm cooking. That's a rarity. That's Halley's Comet. And besides we have to go out tonight. We're both going to be busy in the coming weeks.”

“Oh God. What have you heard?”

“It's going to be called the Anglo-Irish Agreement. Cross-border cooperation, devolved powers going back to the Province, groundwork for a new Assembly. Thatcher has cooked it up with the Irish prime minister.”

“Jesus! When is this going to happen?”

“
Belfast Telegraph
sources say tomorrow afternoon.”

“No consultation with the Unionists?”

“No consultation with anyone. It's just going to be announced as a fait accompli by the Secretary of State . . . so you know . . .”

“It's going to be trouble.”

“Yup. A lot of work for both of us.”

“Thanks, Sara, I'll see you later.”

She gave me a kiss down the phone and I hung up.

I closed the office door, found an emergency joint, rummaged in the bottom-drawer cassette box, stuck in “Police Station Blues” by Peetie Wheatstraw. It didn't quite take, so I fast forwarded the tape to “Stack O' Lee” by Mississippi John Hurt, which worked a little better.

Emotionally righted, I went to see the Chief Inspector. He was white faced, shaking, and he'd already broken out the Black Label.

“Have a drink with me, Duffy.”

Didn't need to be told twice. “You look as if you've seen a ghost, sir.”

“I was at a pow-wow in Belfast.”

“What have the Brits cooked up for us now?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Yeah.”

“New Assembly, devolved powers, the Irish government to have a say in Northern Irish affairs.”

“Sounds reasonable.”

“It's completely reasonable. In a normal society all the political parties would welcome this.”

I poured myself a modest measure of the Black Label. He opened his filing cabinet and gave me a folder marked “Secret.”

“All the station chiefs got a copy a day early. Read it here. In my office. Don't make any notes, just read it. I'll go get some grub and come back in ten minutes.”

He exited and left me with the whiskey and a photocopy of the Anglo-Irish Agreement.

I read it.

It was a deal between the Thatcher and FitzGerald governments aimed at generating political progress in Ulster. McArthur was right. It was harmless stuff. A benign, innocuous series of cross-border panels and task forces, and an attempt to get a regional assembly off the ground. In theory, Nationalists would like it because of the cross-border dimensions and the nuanced notion that the views of the Irish government had to be taken into account when discussing Northern Irish affairs. Unionists would like it (the civil servants must have thought) because it guaranteed the union of Northern Ireland with the rest of the UK until a majority of its population wanted a change in its sovereign status.

McArthur came back in with a packet of Mr. Kipling's French Fancies.

I took one of the pink ones.

“Your assessment, Duffy?”

“You're right, sir. In a normal country this bold attempt to seize the middle ground would be met with polite agreement by all sides of the political divide.”

“But not here.”

“Here the politics are centrifugal not centrist. Extreme Nationalists and extreme Unionists will condemn the Agreement as a sell-out of their principles, and the moderates in the middle who support it will look like fools.”

“Special Branch reckons the Unionists will give us the most trouble.”

“I expect so, sir.”

For seventy-five years, ever since Winston Churchill's promise to send Dreadnoughts to bombard Belfast during the Third Home Rule Crisis, the Unionists had suspected some sort of treachery from Albion Perfide. It was obvious to everyone that Britain's political class wanted to get out of Northern Ireland just as they had got out of India, Malaya, Aden, Rhodesia, and all the other nasty post-imperial trouble spots. Few Unionist politicians had the ability to parse the subtleties of Whitehall's actions—yes, the Brits were leaving, but they were going to take fifty years to do it, and they weren't going to run out with their tail between their legs as they did in, say, Palestine. The Anglo-Irish Agreement was not Albion Perfide.

McArthur and I finished the bottle of whiskey between us.

“I suppose we're just unlucky, sir, to have this on your watch.”

“Or lucky. Depends on your point of view.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Back where I'm from—across the water—people do what, exactly? Go to the shopping mall, go to the garden center, watch the fucking football? Eighty years of that until you die in a hospital bed, fat and alone, suffering from cancer or congestive heart failure. Our ancestors were hunters, Duffy. Survival of the fittest! A thousand generations of hunters. Hunters not bloody shoppers! And at least here we're fighting for a better tomorrow.”

“Er, that's not the speech you're going to give to the men, is it?” I said anxiously.

“Why shouldn't I?”

I thought about McCrabban. “Well, for one thing most of them are quite religious, sir.”

“Look, Duffy, maybe the forces of chaos will win, probably they will win, but we'll give them a hell of a fight of it, eh, Sean, eh?”

He yawned heavily and I was relieved to see that it was just the whiskey talking. “Yes, sir,” I replied in a monotone.

He stared at me, his eyes like Elmer Fudd's in
Hare-Brained Hypnotist
.

“Sir, if you don't mind, I have a dinner engagement with a young lady.”

“What? A young lady? Lucky you. Yeah, you should go. Go to your dinner and then go to bed, Duffy. For sleep, mind you! Get some sleep in, now. I don't think we're going to get much of it over the next few weeks.”

9: CONTACT HIGH

The morning of November 15, 1985. Gentle rain falling over Ulster, falling over a country on the verge of the biggest crisis since the Hunger Strikes. How can you police a society facing a general uprising? How can you investigate a murder in a time of incipient civil war?

The beeper, of course, was going in the living room, but I didn't want to go downstairs and get it.

I wanted to stay here in bed. With her.

Sara Prentice's sleeping face. Strange and intelligent and beautiful in the blue flame of the paraffin heater.

Her green eyes opened. She smiled.

“What are you doing, Sean?”

“Looking at you.”

“Why?”

“Why not?”

She shook her head. “Have you got any ciggies?”

I lit her one.

She sat up in the bed and stared at me. “Two can play at that game,” she said. She stared at me and tapped me on the forehead. “So, what is it that makes Sean Duffy tick?”

“This isn't for a story, is it?”

She laughed. “Ha! Don't flatter yourself . . . Although you were in the papers a couple of years back, weren't you, Sean? Around the time of the DeLorean scandal. Your name was in the index.”

I said nothing.

“Don't worry, though. You're old news now. In a place with a slower news cycle you might be a story, but here? That's ancient history.”

“That's a relief.”

“But
I'm
curious. For me. What makes Sean Duffy tick? What's a nice Catholic boy doing in the Protestant RUC?”

“I ask myself the same question.”

“And what's the answer?”

She was looking at me with unfeigned interest. Not professional interest. Just boyfriend—girlfriend interest. At least I hoped it was that. It was an uncomfortable question. A metaphysical question. I'd been avoiding those kinds of questions for a long time now.

“Well, initially, I thought I could make a difference . . . Ten years ago now. I thought I could maybe help put an end to the madness.”

“And now?”

“Now I realize that one man can do very little.”

She nodded. “You look so sad, Sean. Stay there. I'll go make you some breakfast.”

She came back with coffee and burnt toast. I ate it. I was grateful for the effort.

“So, what do you think is going to happen today?” she asked.

“I don't know. I really don't know.”

What happened was: riots, strikes, rallies, demonstrations. And over the coming days: power cuts, graffiti on police station walls, Loyalist youths attacking peelers in safe Protestant districts.

Operation Black was instituted for CID; all investigations were suspended and detectives were seconded to riot duty.

“Hard-working senior and junior detectives seconded to riot duty!” I heard myself saying to McCrabban in the office one morning. But we all understood. The threat was existential. Northern Ireland had always been a place that was born bristling with paradox. All countries are illusions, but in the six counties of the north of Ireland the magic act had never been very convincing.

The first full day of Operation Black we spent on riot duty in North Belfast, standing like eejits in the rain under our Perspex shields while weans from the surrounding streets threw stones and half-bricks at us. Lawson and Fletcher were terrified. Crabbie and I didn't like it. And it would only get worse when the Protestant kids learned how to make Molotov cocktails and petrol bombs. A riot was a frost fair, a jubilee, an escape from the dreariness of everyday life.

The second day of Operation Black we spent on riot duty in West Belfast, going to the Shankill Road in the morning and the Falls Road in the afternoon and night. Attacked by Protestant kids and then Catholic kids on the same day. Nice.

It didn't help that no one came forward to defend the Agreement at all. The Irish ran from it. The British were quickly embarrassed by it. One brave local Unionist politician, John Cranston, did quote from Bernard Williams'
Which Slopes Are Slippery?
but Cranston was howled down by colleagues who preferred to quote from the books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Ulster Protestants were a dour, undemonstrative people, and it was the word on the street and in the pulpit that counted, and that word was that the Brits were going to withdraw from Northern Ireland and pass on the job of keeping the peace between the Protestants and Catholics to the US Marines or the UN or, God save us, the two undermanned regiments of the Irish Army . . .

I went home after the third day of rioting to find Mrs. Bridewell standing in her front garden with her arms folded. She was a looker was Mrs. Bridewell, recently divorced, today wearing a little miniskirt and heels with muck-covered gardening gloves. A loose brown hair was hanging fetchingly over her rosy left cheek.

“I'm awful sorry, Mr. Duffy. We're all awful sorry,” she said.

“Sorry about what?” I began, and then I saw it. Someone had sprayed-painted a swastika on my front door, and underneath it they'd scrawled “SS RUC.”

I nodded to Mrs. Bridewell, turned right, and walked down the street to Bobby Cameron's house.

I knocked on his door and saw him peering at me through the fisheye security lens.

He opened the door in a white tank top holding an Airfix 1:16 scale Hawker Hurricane. He was still channeling Brian Clough, but this time it was after a home win and a favorable write-up by Hugh McIlvanney in the
Daily Express
.

“What is it, Duffy? I'm in the middle of doing me models.”

“Someone's painted a swastika on my front door.”

“Have they? Well, that's what you get for being part of a fascist organization hell-bent on repressing the Protestant people of Ulster.”

“Did you know one of my new trainees is Jewish? What if I'd had him over for dinner tonight and he'd seen that? Or what if I'd had my girl over? Eh?”

“You make your bed, you lie in it, Duffy. You were out of the RUC and now you're back in, and you have to take the fucking consequences.”

“I want that swastika off my door tonight, and if anyone ever fucks with my house again, I guarantee you a police raid on
your
house every night until the end of time.”

“Or until someone murders you.”

“Or until some mad, pissed-off, rogue peeler with nothing much to lose murders you, Bobby.”

“A raid on my house won't find anything.”

“I'm sure your wife will love seeing all the family valuables in the street. And anyway, by the sixth or seventh raid the forensics boys will be so fed up not finding anything that they will find something . . . do you know what I mean?”