Gun Street Girl (37 page)

But the real destination of the missiles explained what in fact happened with the year-long Special Branch investigation: nothing. Two apprentices at Short Brothers were eventually charged with aiding and abetting the theft. Special Branch was seeking Nigel Vardon to assist them with their inquiries, but Mr. Vardon had mysteriously disappeared.

That evening gave me yet another reason to leave the RUC: the constant chickenshit. Literally days after surviving an epic gun battle on Muck Island without so much as a powder burn on my fingers, I was to break an ankle and an arm responding to a domestic violence call while I was actually off duty. This was typical. Typical of life as a detective in the RUC. Typical of the human comedy in general.

Wet weekday night.
Badlands
on the box. I'd just got to Terrence Malick's cameo as a neighbor knocking on his friend's door when not a minute later there was a knock at my door that became a persistent banging.

“Jesus Christ!”

Hallway. Peephole. Bobby Cameron. He was unshaven, his hair was wild, and there was a stain on his red lumberjack shirt that could be anything from barbecue sauce to human blood. He was wearing black jeans and big shit-kicker DM boots. In fact he looked a lot like Desperate Dan from the
Dandy
comic, which wasn't as reassuring an image as you would have thought.

I opened the door. “What's the matter?”

“Does something always have to be the matter?” he said.

“With you it does.”

“Need your help, Duffy.”

“If it's about the fucking lion, there's nothing I can do.”

“It's not about the lion. It's a domestic. Artie McFall's giving his wife a hiding across the way. My missus and the neighbors on both sides can't stand it. Normally I'd take care of things, but obviously here I can't get involved.”

“Why not?”

“Artie's a connected man.”

“What do you mean?”

“Do I have to spell it out, Duffy? Artie's UVF. If I went over there and broke his door down and beat the living shit out of him there'd be a feud, wouldn't there?”

“Oh, because you're UDA.”

“I'm not admitting that, Duffy. But we can't have a feud between paramilitary organizations, can we?”

“Look at you, Bobby, the Talleyrand of Coronation Road.” I sighed. “But you're right, we can't have a feud, can we? A domestic, you say?”

“Yeah, don't bring your gun. Artie's pissed out of his mind. We don't want an escalation.”

“Don't tell me how to do my job,” I said, lifting the Glock off the phone table. For all I knew he was leading me to an ambush. However, as soon as I stepped outside I could hear Artie McFall's wife's screams.

“See?” Bobby said.

We crossed the street and made our way through a crowd of angry women. “Fucking finally. Our heroes,” one of them said sarcastically.

Upstairs the screaming had become a quiet whimper between thumps.

I banged on the front door. “Police! Open up!”

“G'way and fuck yourself, this is none of your business!” came the reply from upstairs.

I looked at Bobby. “Gimme a hand with the door.”

Bobby produced a sledgehammer. “I'll take care of this, but I can't go inside the house.”

Swing hammer swing. The plywood council house front door disintegrated.

A hall full of broken things. A sobbing five-year-old girl.

More thumping from upstairs. Up the steps two at a time.

Artie McFall waiting for me on the landing with a cricket bat. He'd smashed the lights so I didn't even see him until it was too late. A cricket bat in the gut and I went backward down the stairs, breaking my arm and ankle.

McFall came down the stairs after me. I drew my Glock. “Take one more step and I swear to God it'll be your fucking last,” I said.

He could see that I was dead serious.

He dropped the bat.

“Sit down where you are.”

He sat.

A street posse held him until backup arrived from Carrick RUC. An ambulance took me to the Royal. Fractured fibula. Fractured calcaneus.

I was released after two days. Foot in a cast. Arm in a cast and a sling. I didn't know it then, but that was my Blue Tiger moment: Artie McFall was the blind beggar who, as in the Borges story, had given me back my days and nights. Had saved me from death, by preventing me riding in the Chinook . . .

Kate and Kendrick came to see me.

“Gosh! What happened to you, Sean?” Kate asked.

“I fell down some stairs.”

“Your stairs?”

“What difference does it make whose stairs it was?”

“Good point. Are you still on for lunch?”

“I'll have to check my busy social calendar.”

Kendrick drove the Jag. Kate sat in the back with me and talked. It was all business. I liked that. Kate talking. Kendrick smiling in the rear-view. Kate wearing jeans and a silk, polo-neck sweater. Kendrick wearing a red shirt and corduroys. Their ensemble calculated to disarm and relax me—it didn't, of course, but I admired the thought that had gone into it.

I'd made my decision but I wanted to hear her tell me I was doing the right thing. “So if I stayed in the RUC, what would my future be like?”

“Very dull. The RUC's patience has been worn thin. The feeling of the top brass is that there will be no more, quote, ‘teaching moments for you,' unquote.”

“I couldn't play by their rules.”

“It's their feeling, Sean, that you couldn't play by
any
rules. It's their feeling that you again, quote, ‘think you're special,' unquote.”

“I never said that. Nor thought it. And none of this is news anyway. I know how they feel about me. I know that I'm no longer being groomed for the bigger and better. The future belongs to the Lawsons of this world.”

“The best you can hope for, Sean, is that they let you stay a lowly detective in an out-of-the-way station where you can't cause too much trouble.”

“Not a terrible life.”

“But not a terribly productive one for someone of your abilities.”

“Why doesn't my bad reputation scare you, Kate?” I asked.

“I can see that you have matured, Sean.”

“Is that what you tell your bosses?”

“I am the boss. I can more or less recruit whomever I like.”

Lunch was a place in Cultra, County Down, that had garnered a Michelin star. It was all “freshly sourced” this and “locally produced” that. I got the lamb chops and both Kendrick and Kate got the Strangford Lough trout.

With my injuries it was impossible to use a knife and fork so Kate was mother and cut up my chops and potatoes.

We were sitting on a balcony overlooking fields of cows and sheep and a little deserted beach.

“So what do you think, Sean? Would you like to come and work for us? We've been patient. We waited until your case was solved.”

I looked at her. She was really very beautiful. How had I not seen that before? Beautiful and intelligent and, well, rich . . . And I liked her. I liked her very much. Although she had discounted in her mind the possibility of us ever getting together, you never knew what might happen, did you?

“My case wasn't really solved,” I said.

“Resolved, then. We let you finish it without interference because we knew that it was important to you.”

I didn't pick up on the tone then, but I should have.
We let you finish it 
. . .

“The police, Sean. That's the tactical battle. The strategic battle is being fought by us.”

I remembered something she'd told me a few years ago. About the long game the British were playing.
The strategic retreat from Empire
.

“What's the actual process?” I asked.

“You provisionally accept our offer of employment. You get vetted. You sign the Official Secrets Act. You join,” Kendrick explained.

“And resign from the RUC.”

“Naturally, yes,” Kendrick said.

I wanted to say yes. I wanted to tell her that I'd already typed my resignation letter. But to leave the police after ten hard years? The words stuck in my throat.

“Why don't you say yes to the vetting process. Let us vet while you make your final decision,” Kate said.

“OK, then,” I agreed.

“And look, Sean, we're having a big intelligence pow-wow in Scotland next week. We're gathering together all the bigwigs from all the agencies. The C2 group, all N.I. Contact, us, our sister service, army intel, police, Special Branch. Even some Europeans and Americans,” Kate said.

“You have conferences?”

“Like I say, Sean, it's about strategy, not tactics. Northern Ireland's next ten years. And the thirty after that. We're not going to make the same mistakes on our doorstep that we made in India. We'd like you to come, Sean. Meet some very bright, very interesting people. Come if your leg and arm can take it.”

“My leg and arm will be fine,” I said. “I'll come.”

They drove me home to Coronation Road.

Kate walked me to the front door.

“They've blown you up. They've shot you. They've pushed you down stairs. I think it's time to come off the line and get behind a desk, eh? Move up an echelon. Be one of the thinkers, not the cannon fodder.”

It was a revealing comment. For her this was the logical next step for me. Promotion to officer class.

The next morning the phone rang. I put down my coffee cup and answered it.

“Hello?”

“Sean, I'm sorry. This is a bit of an annoyance but the RAF won't let you come in the helicopter. They say that you and your injuries would be a hazard in the Chinook in any kind of emergency situation.”

“Isn't part of their job to fly injured people?”

“Not these particular pilots. I'm afraid the flight lieutenant was very strict about it. I'm most dreadfully sorry.”

“It doesn't matter. We'll talk when you get back.”

“You passed your vetting, by the way. Don't be impressed. Almost everyone does. You'd be surprised by the people in the Northern Ireland Department who have passed their vetting.”

“I don't think I would.”

“No, I don't think you would either. After I get back from the conference I'll officially send you an application form and you'll officially have to resign.”

“I've drafted my letter. Just have to type it up.”

“I thought so. Will you be sad to go?”

“You've made a strong case for my continuing uselessness in the RUC. I'll only work for you, though, Kate. Only you. I trust you.”

“Don't worry. I'm the only one that will have you!”

We both laughed. “I'll talk to you next week when I get back. Good-bye, Sean.”

“Bye, Kate.”

She hung up.

I didn't see her the next week.

I never saw her again.

29: FLOW MY TEARS THE POLICEMAN SAID

Sssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss 
. . .

And so on . . .

Et cetera . . .

Imagine a page of esses. Imagine it so we can save on ink. S after s after s. You know what that noise is? The primordial hiss from the Big Bang. From Deep Time. Static. That's all we are. Tiny blips of consciousness in a great grey ocean of static and entropy . . .

I have just finished yet another draft of my resignation letter, typing with one finger. I have praised McCrabban and Lawson. I have recommended that McCrabban be given my job and that Lawson be promoted from acting to full-time detective constable.

I reread the letter, sign it, and seal it up.

I make a cup of coffee and look for a stamp.

I hear a Chinook flying low over the town. The distinctive noise is the twin turbo shaft engines delivering 4,000 horsepower to the counter-rotating rotors.

I find a stamp and set the letter aside to post later.

Thud, thud, thud, thud
goes the Chinook.

I go into the garden to see the chopper.

Onion sky.

Coral sky.

Black sky.

Disappearing rotor blades.

Back into 113 Coronation Road. On the living room hi-fi is
Rain Dogs
by Tom Waits. Side 2, the point where “Walking Spanish” bleeds into “Downtown Train.”

The smell is Nestlé instant coffee, Virginia tobacco, and the molasses in the toasting veda bread.

Breakfast over, I put on the radio. “We are getting reports of a helicopter crash in the Mull of Kintyre . . .”

Later there will be an inquest. And later still a public inquiry. Pilot error, the inquest will say. Institutional failures that led to overwork and pilot exhaustion, the inquiry will say.

There will be skeptics who suspect foul play. It would have been quite the coup for the IRA if they'd done it. But of course the intelligence agencies would have known if the IRA were planning something like that because of their mole within the IRA Army Council.

No, it isn't an act of terrorism.

Merely an accident. An RAF Chinook filled with all the top MI5, MI6 and Special Branch agents in Northern Ireland flying into a mountain on the Mull of Kintyre. Every single person on board killed. An entire intelligence cohort utterly wiped out. Kate, Kendrick, all of them.

Pilot error, the inquest will say.

RAF institutional failures that led to pilot error, the inquiry will insist.

You can get the report from Her Majesty's Stationery Office and decide for yourself.

You don't need to see me drop my coffee cup.

You don't need to see my knees bend.

You don't need to see me rush to the telephone and wait all afternoon for confirmation of the bad news.

No, we're done here. The clock poised at 9:05. The clock stopped.

We'll take our leave.

Up through the kitchen ceiling, up through the back bedroom, up through the attic and the tiles on the roof . . .