Chapter 1 The Great Escape
The beeper began to whine at four twenty seven
p.m. on Wednesday the 25th September, 1983. It was repeating a shrill C sharp
at four second intervals which meant - for those of us who had bothered to read
the manual - that it was a Class 1 emergency. This was a general alert being
sent to every off duty policeman, police reservist and soldier in Northern
Ireland. There were only five Class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet
nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion and what the civil servants who’d written the
manual had nonchalantly called “an extra-terrestrial trespass”.
So
you’d think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper and
ran with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. You’d have thought
wrong. For a start I was as high as Skylab, baked on Turkish black cannabis
resin that I’d cooked myself and rolled into sweet Virginia tobacco. And then
there was the fact that I was playing Galaxian on my Atari 5200 with the sound
on the TV maxed and the curtains pulled for a full dramatic and immersive
experience. I didn’t notice the beeper because its insistent whine sounded a
lot like the red ships peeling off from the main Galaxian fleet as they swooped
in for their oh so predictable attack.
They
didn’t present any difficulty at all despite the sick genius of their teenage
programmers back in Osaka because I had the moves and the skill and all they
had were ones and zeroes. I slid the joystick to the left, hugged the corners
of the screen and easily dodged their layered cluster bomb assault. A lone
straggler attempted to trap me with his guided missiles but I was miles too
fast for him and skated casually out of his way. That survived, I eased into
the middle of the screen and killed the entire squadron as they attempted to
get back into formation. It was only when the screen was blank and I saw that I
was nudging close to my previous high score that I noticed the grey plastic
rectangle sitting on the coffee table, beeping and vibrating with what in
retrospect seemed to be more than its usual vehemence. I threw a pillow over
the device, sat back down on the rug and continued with the game.
The phone began to ring and it went on and on and
finally more out of boredom than curiosity I paused the game and answered it.
It was Sergeant Pollock, the duty man at Bellaughray Station.
“Duffy, you didn’t answer your beeper!”
he said.
“Maybe
the Soviet army blocked the signal.”
“What?”
“What’s
going on Pollock?” I asked him.
“You’re
in Carrickfergus, right?”
“Aye.”
“Report
to your local police station. This is a Class 1 emergency.”
“What’s
the story?”
“It’s
big. There’s been a mass breakout of IRA prisoners from the Maze prison.”
“Jesus!
What a cock up.”
“It’s
panic stations, mate. We need every man.”
“Ok.
But remember this is my off day so I’ll be on double time.”
“How
can you think of money at a time like this, Duffy?”
“Surprisingly
easily, Pollock. Remember double time. Put it in the log.”
“All
right.”
“Another
fine job from Her Majesty’s Prison Service, eh?”
“You
can say that again. Let’s just hope we can clean up their mess. . .Listen are
you ok with going to Carrick? I know you haven’t been back there since you
were, uh, demoted. I could always send to Newtownabbey RUC.”
“Never
fret, Pollock. I shall thrive on my native heath.”
“I
hope so.”
I
hung up and addressed the Galaxian Fleet hovering silently on the TV screen: “Return
to your alien masters and tell them that we Earthmen are not so easly crushed,”
and with that I pulled the Atari out of back of the TV and flipped on the news.
HM Prison Maze (previously known as Long Kesh) was a maximum security prison
considered to be one of the most escape proof penitentiaries in Europe. Of
course whenever you heard words like “escape proof” you immediately thought of
that other great Belfast innovation, the “unsinkable” Titanic. The facts came drifting in as I put on my uniform and body
armour. 38 IRA prisoners had escaped from H Block 7 of the facility. They had
used smuggled-in guns to take hostages, then they’d grabbed a laundry van and
stormed the gates. One prison officer was dead and twenty others had been
injured. “Among the escapees are
convicted murderers and some of the IRA’s leading bomb makers,” said an
attractive, breathless young newsreader in the BBC studio.
“Well
that’s fantastic,” I muttered and wondered if it was anybody I’d personally put
away. I made a cup of instant coffee and had a bowl of Frosties to get the Turkish
black out of my system and then I went outside to my waiting BMW.
“Oh
Mr Duffy, you won’t have heard the news!” Mrs Campbell said to me over the
fence. I was wearing a flak jacket, a riot helmet and carrying a Heckler and
Koch MP5 submachine gun so it wasn’t a particularly brilliant deduction from
Mrs C, but I gave her a grim little smile and said “About the escape you mean?”
She
tucked a vivid line of burgundy hair behind an ear. “Yes, it’s shocking,
they’ll murder us all in our beds! What will I do with my Stephen upstairs on
disability?” Stephen’s ‘disability’ was a steady diet of gin which meant that
by lunchtime he was as pickled as Oliver Reed during the making of The Three Musketeers.
She
was a handsome woman was Mrs Campbell even with her troubles and her 1950's
nightdress and with a fag end hanging out of her mouth.
“Don’t
concern yourself Mrs C, I’ll be back soon,” I said trying to sound like
Christopher Reeve in Superman II when
he reassures Lois that General Zod will be no match for him. I’m not sure she
quite got the element of self parody in my Reeve impersonation but she did lean
over the fence, give me an ashy kiss on the cheek and whisper “thank you.”
I
responded with a little nod of the head, walked down the path and got inside my
BMW. Before I put the key in the ignition I got out again and looked underneath
the vehicle for mercury tilt bombs. There were none and I re-entered and stuck
in a cassette of Robert Plant’s Principle
of Moments. This was my fourth listen to Plant’s solo album and I still
couldn’t bring myself to like it. It was all synthesizers, drum machines and
high pitched vocals. It was a sign of the times and with the autumn upon us it
was safe to say that 1983 was turning out to be the worst year in popular music
for about two decades.
I drove along the Scotch Quarter and
turned right into Carrickfergus RUC station for the first time in a long time.
It was a very strange experience and the young guard at the gate didn’t know
me. He checked my warrant card, nodded, looked at me, frowned, raised the
barrier and finally let me through. I parked in the crappy visitor’s car park
far from the station and walked to the duty sergeant’s desk. There had been a
few changes. They’d painted the walls mental hospital pink and there were
potted plants everywhere. I knew that Chief Inspector Brennan had retired and
in his place they had brought in an officer from Derry called Superintendent
Carter. I didn’t know much about him except that he was young and energetic and
full of ideas - which, admittedly, sounded just ghastly. But this wasn’t my
manor anymore so what did I care what they did to the old place.
Running
Carrickfergus CID branch on a temporary basis was my former adjutant, the
freshly promoted, Detective Sergeant John McCrabban, and that was a good thing.
I went upstairs slipped in the back of the briefing room and tried not to draw
attention to myself.
“.
. .might be of some use. We’re instituting Operation Cauldron. Blocking every
road to and from the Maze. Our patch is the access roads to the north and east,
the A2 and of course the roads to Antrim. We are coordinating with Ballyclare
RUC. . .”
Carter
was tall with a prominent Adam’s apple and brown curly hair. He was rangy and
he leaned over the podium in a menacing way as if he was going to clip you
round the ear. I listened to his talk, which spoke of dangers and challenges
and finished with an echo of Winston Churchill’s ‘Fight Them On The Beaches’
speech. As rhetoric it was wildly over the top but some of the younger reserve
constables clapped when it was done. As we were filing out of the briefing room
I said hello to a few old friends. Inspector Douggie McCallister shook my hand.
“It’s great to see you, Sean. Jeez, if you’d been here five minutes earlier you
would have caught up with McCrabban and Matty but they’re away with the riot
police. How ya been?”
“I’ve
been fair to middling, Douglas. How’s your new boss?”
Douggie
rolled his eyes and lowered his voice: “If he wasn’t a six footer I’d have said
that he was a short man in need of a balcony.”
“Oh
dear. You could always do the old Thorazine-in-the-whisky trick.”
“Total
abstainer, Sean. Tea drinker. Wants to ban booze from the station, from the
whole island too if his pamphlets are to believed.”
“I
think they tried that approach in America with decidedly mixed results.”
“Aye
well, one crisis at a time, let me sort you out with a duty roster. Can you
still drive a Land Rover?”
“Does
the Pope shit in the woods?”
I
got my armoured police Land Rover and headed out with a group of nervous
constables to a place called Derryclone on the shores of Lough Neagh. It took
us over two and a half hours to get through all the police roadblocks so that
we could reach our destination and set up our own roadblock. This was the much
vaunted Operation Cauldron in action.
Radio
3 were playing Ligeti’s Requiem and
the sombre mood wasn’t helped by the black clouds and the light rain and solitary
crows cawing at us from sagging telegraph wires. When I opened the back doors
of the Rover two of the men were reading their Gideon New Testatments, one appeared to have been crying and the sole
Catholic reservist was, embarrassingly, fingering a Rosary.
“Bloody
hell, lads! It’s like a Juarez minibus on the Dia de Los Muertos in here. Come on! This is routine. We are not
going to encounter any terrorist desperadoes, I promise you.”
We
set up our block along the sleepy B road by Lough Neagh and after an hour or
two of nothingness it was evident to even the gloomiest young peeler that none
of the Maze escapees were coming our way.
We
saw helicopters with spotlights flying back and forth from RAF Aldergrove and on
the radio we heard that first, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland had
tended his resignation, and later, that Mrs Thatcher herself had resigned.
No
such luck. No one had resigned and I prophesied to the boys that when the report
into the break-out was published no one above the rank of Inspector would even
get a reprimand. (You can read the 1984 Hennessy Report for yourself if you
want proof of my uncanny fortune telling abilities.)
Another
Land Rover arrived at our road-block from Ballymena RUC and the coppers spoke
in a dialect so thick we had trouble understanding them. Much of their
conversation seemed to involve Jesus and tractors, an unlikely combination for
anyone who doesn’t know Ballymena. Yet another Land Rover came in the late
evening this one carrying lads from as far away as Coleraine. No one had
thought to bring hot chocolate or hot cocoa or food or cigarettes, but the
Inspector from Coleraine RUC had brought along a travel chess set just to have
the satisfaction of beating all of us. I told him my Boris Spassky story
(Reporter: “Which do you prefer, Mr Spassky, chess or sex?” Spassky: “It very much
depends on the position.”) But he was not impressed and mated me in eleven
moves.
It
began to rain harder around midnight and the night was long and cold. In the
wee hours we finally stopped a car: an Austin Maxi with an elderly female
driver who’d been trying to get home from church since lunch time. In the boot,
alas, there were no escaped prisoners. She did have a tin of shortbread and
after some discussion in the interests of good community relations we let her
keep it.
Bored
senseless we listened in on the confused and contradictory police radio traffic.
There had been some rioting in West Belfast but this was an obvious ploy to
distract the cops so central command hadn’t diverted many troops or peelers to
deal with it.
Just
before dawn there was a bit of excitement on the southern part of the lough when
an army helicopter pilot thought he had seen someone hiding in the reeds. The
radio barked into life and we and several other mobile patrols were scrambled
and sent down to check it out. When we got there a small unit of Welsh Guardsmen
were shooting into the water with machine guns. As the sun came up we saw that
they had done a good job of massacring an exhausted flock of Greenland geese
who had foolishly touched down here on their journey to the South of France.
The
Ballymena boys grabbed a goose each and we drove back to our outpost. I sat up
in the Land Rover cab and tuned in BBC Radio 4. The latest news was that
eighteen of the escapees had been recaptured but the others had gotten clean
away. At noon we got the list of their names. They were all unknown to me
except for one. . .but that one was Dermot McCann. Dermot and I had gone to
school together in Derry at St. Malachy’s. A really smart guy, he had been Head
Boy when I had been Deputy Head Boy. Handsome, good at games and charming,
Dermot had planned to go into the newspaper business and possibly into TV
journalism. But the Troubles had changed all that and Dermot had volunteered
for the IRA just as I had once thought of doing at around the time of Bloody
Sunday.
Through
various machinations I had joined the police and Dermot had served several
years in the Provos before getting himself arrested. He was a highly gifted IRA
explosives expert and bomb maker who’d only been betrayed in the end by an
informer. The grass fingered Dermot as an important player but there was no forensic
evidence so some clever peeler had fitted him up by putting a fingerprint on a
block of gelignite. He’d been found guilty and until his escape he’d been doing
ten years for conspiracy to cause explosions.
I
hadn’t thought of Dermot in a long time but in the weeks that followed the
break-out we learned that he had been one of the masterminds behind the escape
plan. Dermot had figured out a way of smuggling guns into the prison and it was
his idea to take prison officers hostage and dress in their uniforms so the
guard towers wouldn’t be alerted.
Dermot
got to South Tyrone and over the border into the Irish Republic. I heard later from
MI5 that he and an elite IRA team had been spotted at a terrorist training camp
in Libya. But even on that miserable Monday morning on the eastern shores of
Lough Neagh with the mist rising off the water and the rain drizzling from the
grey September sky I knew with the chilly logic of a fairy story that our paths
would cross again.
Chapter 2 The Little Escape
It was late on a cold December day and Prisoner 239
was doing now what he did best: waiting. He had not always been good at this.
As a boy he had been aggressive and forward. At school he had been brilliant
but often impatient and rash. It was in the Maze Prison where he had learned
about waiting. As an IRA leader he’d often been put in solitary where waiting
had been his only companion. He had waited in the Maze for five years:
learning, scheming, plotting. And here, in this concrete coffin on the edge of
the desert, although it was harder to keep track of time, he was waiting again.
In the first few days after his arrest he had raged and fumed and banged his
fists against the iron door. “This is all a huge mistake!” he had yelled. “We
were invited here!” But it hadn’t done any good. All that it had done was make
them rush in with rubber hoses to shut him up.
He
knew that he was not alone in the facility but here there were no prisoners in
the cells on either side of him which increased his sense of isolation, as did
the high window, the enclosed exercise yard and the guards who had been
instructed never to talk to him or respond to his questions. But it only took
him a few days to remember his old skills. He learned again to use the time and
not to let the time use him. He read the French novels they gave him and what
was left of the English newspapers after the prison censor had had his way with
them. Censor is a lowly position in every culture and no doubt what the man cut
from the pages revealed more than he could possibly imagine.
He
began writing his thoughts down in the journals they left for him. On every
other page he made drawings from memory of his mother, siblings and scenes from
Derry. He must have known that when they took him to the exercise yard or the
shower block they read and photographed what he had written, but he didn’t
care. He wrote poems and notes for political manifestos and stories about his
childhood. Perhaps he even wrote about me although I doubt that and certainly
my name was not mentioned in the materials British Intelligence subsequently
gave to me. In truth I was never one of his best friends; more of a hanger-on,
a runner, a groupie. . .For a while in the sixth form I was even a comic foil,
a court jester. . .until he tired of me and promoted some other loser into that
position.
As the weeks dragged on, Prisoner 239’s
journal entries grew more elaborate. He described his experiences growing up in
the Bogside in the 50s and 60s. He talked about that awful day in Derry with the
paratroopers had shot dead a dozen civilians who had only been marching for
equal rights. . .He mentioned how Bloody Sunday had galvanised him and every
other young man in the city.
Including
me of course. In fact the last time I had seen Dermot McCann in the flesh was
when I had meekly sought him out and asked if I too could join the Provos. He
had turned me down flat. “You’re at Queens University, Duffy. Stay there. The
movement needs men with brains as well as brawn.”
Of
course after I had joined the peelers he had no doubt expunged all thoughts of
me from his life. . .
On
that last December day, Prisoner 239 had taken the thin white mattress off the
bed and placed it on the cell floor. He wrote in his journal that if he lay in
the corner of the cell near the door he could occasionally see a thin cirrus
cloud through the high slit windows. He could smell the desert on the southern
Khamseen and although he wasn’t supposed to know where he was being held, he
knew that he was south east of Tobruk, probably less than a dozen miles from
the Egyptian border. Freedom. . .if he could get out and make a break for it.
And if anybody could get out of a Gadhafi dungeon it was Dermot McCann.
He
lay on the floor and wrote about the sky as it changed colours throughout the
late afternoon. He described the ful and
flat bread they brought him at six o’clock. He wrote about the night-time
prison symphony: keys turning in locks, the squeak of sneakers along a polished
floor, men talking on the floor below, a distant radio, vermin outside in the
hallway, a lorry clanking along one of the border roads and when the wind was
right, the howling of jackals at one of the desert wadis.
Prisoner 239 wrote and waited. He
explored the vistas of his own mind and memory. “Society improveth the understanding”
he scribbled on the very first page of the book “but solitude is the school of
genius!”
On
that final December evening, he lit a red candle stub (red wax was on the
notebook) made a drawing of a fox, fixed his blanket about him and went to sleep.
No doubt he woke with the sun and when the guards came into his cell to bring
him breakfast perhaps he sensed the change in their mood and attitude. Maybe he
noticed that they were smiling at him and that one of them was carrying a brand
new suit of clothes.
Chapter 3 The Incident
December. It had been a year now since I’d been
thrown out of CID and reduced from detective inspector to the rank of sergeant
– an ordinary sergeant that is, not a detective
sergeant. As you can imagine after you’ve been a detective it’s very
difficult to go back to regular uniformed police work in a border police
station. The official reason why the RUC had busted me was because I’d broken a
lot of chicken shit rules but really it was because I had offended some high
ranking FBI agents over the DeLorean case and they’d wanted to see me brought
down a peg or two.
Police
stations on the South Armagh border were future finishing schools for alcoholics
and suicides with the added frisson of being shot or blown up on foot patrol,
but what did me in was the night we had to take Sergeant Billy McGivvin home
after he’d caused a drunken scene in a pub. Billy lived in my neck of the woods
and I’d actually been to his house once for dinner so I was put in charge of
delivering him safely back. . .
It
was nine o’clock at night and we were driving up the Lower Island Road into
Ballycarry village. There were three of us. Sergeant McGivvin and myself in the
back, Jimmy McFaul driving up front. In theory it was a double lane road but in
fact it was merely a widened cattle track and Jimmy had us almost over into the
sheugh because a car was coming down the other way.
To avoid dazzling the other driver Jimmy switched
off the full beam headlights as the car went past. I looked through the Land
Rover’s bullet proof windows but there was nothing to see: thick hedgerows on
either side of the road and boggy pasture beyond that.
The Land Rover made a clunking sound.
“What was that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Jimmy said.
“It was something.”
“You think someone shot at us?”
I had heard bullets thudding off the armour plate
of a police Land Rover dozens of times and none of them had made a sound like
that.
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, we got to get McGivvin home,” Jimmy said.
The week before Billy McGivvin’s wife had taken
their three kids and flown the coop. A lawyer told McGivvin that she was in
England and that she was divorcing him because of repeated drunkenness and domestic
violence. McGivvin had decided to refute her claims by going to the Joymount
Arms in Carrickfergus and getting blotto. He had begun swearing at the other
patrons calling the women ‘bitches’ and ‘hoors’ and when they’d tried to make
him leave Billy had pulled out his service revolver.
McGivvin was a terrible police officer before his
wife had left him and no doubt now he was going to be a lot worse. That didn’t
concern me. What concerned me was the possibility that he was going to throw up
over my uniform which was only two days back from the dry cleaners.
“It’s all right, mate, it’s all right,” I kept
assuring him. “Soon be home.”
“Blurgghhhh,” he replied and drooled on the plate
steel Land Rover floor.
We reached Ballycarry village without any trouble
and found his farmhouse on Manse Street. Jimmy parked the Rover and dragged
McGivvin out into the drizzle. We couldn’t find a key, even under a plant pot
or the mat so we had to break in through the back door.
We stuck McGivvin in the recovery position on the
downstairs sofa. We put a bucket next to him and loosened his shirt buttons. There
was an enormous velvet painting of Jesus marching in an Orange Parade that
Jimmy felt might be in vomit spatter range so we took it off the wall and put
it in the dining room.
“I think that’ll do,” I said.
We walked back to the Land Rover and got inside.
We were just in time to hear the Chart Show announcing the Christmas Number 1
for 1983. It was Only You by Vince
Clarke - re-recorded by some tedious a
cappella group.
“The musical taste of this country baffles me
these days,” I said.
Jimmy smiled his twenty four year old smile and
said nothing.
I persuaded him to switch the channel to Radio 3
and Bach took us back to South Armagh.
When we parked at the police station I noticed
that the driver’s side wing mirror was cracked. “Look at that,” I said. “Could
we have hit something on the road?”
“Nah, it was cracked before we left. I’m pretty
sure.”
There was no sign of blood or other forensic
material.
It’s probably
nothing, I thought and we went
inside the heavily fortified barracks to complete the remainder of our shift.
Chapter 4 Suspension Without Pay
We were nearing the end of the foot patrol, which
as any peeler or squaddie will tell you, is the most sickening part of the
whole business. We were close to the police station on the top of the hill and
to be shot within sight of home would be very irritating.
The village was empty. It was a quiet Saturday
morning well before the market. We walked down the middle of the road along the
white lines.
The houses on the left hand side were in the
Irish Republic, those on the right were in the United Kingdom of Great Britain
and Northern Ireland. Our job was to patrol this border and prevent smuggling
and the free movement of IRA arms, personnel and money. The geography made it
an absurd situation. When Northern Ireland had been created in 1921 everyone
had assumed that it was only going to be a temporary solution to the problem of
Ireland’s self rule. No one seriously thought that the complicated twisty
county lines of Fermanagh, Tyrone and Armagh could possibly become the
permanent and police-able border between two separate countries. Yet they had
and this border now ran through fields, villages, sometimes through farms and
individual houses. All along it there were exclaves, enclaves, salients and
other utterly unpatrolable cartographical features.
And here in the village of Bellaughray the border
ran through the centre of town. Technically we were supposed to keep to the
right hand side of the road, because anything over that white dotted line would
be an incursion into the sovereign territory of the Irish Republic and, in
theory, a diplomatic incident; but if you did keep right you were exposed to
snipers all along the County Monaghan hillside, so when I was leading the
patrols, I kept us on the Eire side of the street where the houses would
protect us.
Walking slowly and in single file we reached the
central Bellaughray roundabout and now it was only three hundred yards to the
station.
I had taken eight men out in full body armour and
we were heavily laden with flares, radios and Sterling machine guns. As usual
it had been an exhausting patrol. We had walked across boggy fields, over
sheughs and stone walls, through swamp and slurry and cow shit. We had found no
trace of IRA men or petrol smugglers or sheep stealers, or sheep shaggers come
to that, but nevertheless we had all put our lives on the line for the last
hour and a half.
The IRA snipers were good and thanks to Yankee
dollars they had acquired sophisticated high velocity rifles. They knew our
routines and routes and could easily have been waiting for us from a concealed
den or lair up to three thousand feet away.
But they weren’t. Not this morning anyway. We
went through the roundabout in single file and reached the tiny Catholic
chapel.
The hedge around the tiny red brick structure bothered
me. It was thick and you couldn’t see through it and anything could have been
lurking behind it: a man with a gun, a concealed explosive device. . .
I sent Constable Williams to recon it while I
signalled the rest of the patrol to drop to one knee. Williams went ahead,
looked behind the hedge and found nothing.
He gave me the thumbs up.
“Ok,” I said, “Let’s move out. Nearly home lads.”
As was typical of these late December days the
sun was more or less gone now, swallowed up in the mouths of huge chalky coloured
clouds that were tumbling down from the Mourne Mountains. But even on the
coldest days fear and the heavy equipment kept us drenched with perspiration.
It was starkly beautiful out here under the austere slopes of Slieve Gullion. This
was a hallowed landscape: Cuchulainn’s kingdom in the era of the Táin Bó Cúailnge and in St Patrick’s
time the Terra Repromissionis Sanctorum
– the promised land of the Saints. No Saints about today, or sinners come to
that.
I walked on point for a couple of minutes and
then nodded at Constable Brown whose face assumed the startled look of the stag
in Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen.
“Go on, son, I’ll be right behind you,” I assured
him.
He walked about twenty yards and froze.
“Vehicles!” he yelled.
I looked up into the street. Two cars had parked
themselves laterally at the ends of the road, one was a blue Ford Cortina, Mr
McCoghlan’s, the local butcher, I thought, and the other was an orange Toyota that
I didn't recognize. I wondered why they had blocked the road off. An ambush? A
double car bomb? Or something completely innocent?
Smoke was coming from both exhausts. I raised my
fist so everyone could see it and then I pulled it down. Everyone dropped to
one knee again.
“There goes my arthritis,” Constable Pike
complained.
“Just get down,” I said. “And keep your wits
about you.”
Eventually everyone assumed a crouching or half
kneeling stance - all the better to hit the deck if it was a car bomb and white
hot shrapnel came tearing towards us.
We waited. A raven landed in the road ahead of us
and began pecking at something. The cars just sat up there, blue smoke curling
from their exhausts, the engines turning over quietly. Constable Daniels
started whistling What’s New Pussycat?
more or less off key. I took out my binoculars and looked at the scene. There
were two men in the two cars and they appeared to be talking.
“Hopkins, go up there and investigate!”
“Why me?” Constable Hopkins asked.
“Because it’s your turn on point,” I said.
“When Inspector Calhoun leads the patrol he
always investigates anything suspicious,” Hopkins protested.
“That’s why they pay him the big bucks, isn’t it?
Now get up there and investigate before I take my boot to your arse!”
“All right,” Hopkins said moodily.
“McBeth, you go with him, staggered formation, at
least twenty feet behind. And both of you stay on your toes!”
Hopkins and McBeth went up to the two parked cars
while the rest of us held our breaths.
I knew what the pair of them were thinking.
This is how it ends.
Bang.
An explosion of cordite into the layered chevrons
of ignition powder. Logarithmic expansion. The explosive thrown out of its
plastic casing. Vermilion fire. An entire life lived and ended in an instant. .
.
McBeth and Hopkins reached the cars and talked to
the men inside and came back to us.
“Two old geezers having a chin wag. It’s all
clear,” Hopkins said.
I nodded and just as I got to my feet I heard a
loud crack from somewhere up in the hills. I didn’t need to give the order to
hit the deck. Before I could even open my gob to bark an order everyone was
already on the ground.
“Anybody hurt?” I yelled and called the roll.
“Pike?”
“I’m ok!”
“Brown?”
“I’m all right.”
“Daniels?”
“Ok.”
“McCourt?”
“Ok.”
“Hopkins?”
“Despite your best efforts, sergeant, I’m ok,
too!” he said bitterly.
“McBeth?”
“Aye I’m all right.”
“Did anybody see where that came from?”
No one had. No one had seen anything and no one
knew what the sound had been. Up ahead the two old geezers were still talking.
The question was how long we should remain lying
here. We couldn’t hug the tarmac all day. “Ok, Pike, McBeth, McCourt get over
to the left hand side of the road and scan those bloody hills. If you see a
scope glint or a puff of smoke shoot it. The rest of you, let’s retire by half
squad at three quarter pace up the road. When we’re a hundred metres past them,
we’ll stop and cover them. Everybody clear?”
“Yes, Inspector Duffy!” several - but not all -
of them said.
Pike, McBeth and McCourt ran to the ditch on the
Irish Republic side and pointed their machine guns at the hills. Of course if
it was a sniper he’d be concealed and
thousands of feet away and the effective range of the Sterling was a hundred
feet max but if the three of them blazed away together they might hit
something.
The rest of us got to our feet and ran up the
road. We stopped and let Pike and his mates reach us.
We did this two more times until we reached the
station.
No one shot at us. If it was a sniper, he was a
very cautious one. One shot and then done. We patrolled this road every day.
His opportunity would come again.
I let every man in the squad go in the barracks
ahead of me and then I went in last. I didn’t completely relax until the thick
iron gates closed behind me. As usual I was utterly exhausted when I walked
through the double doors of the locker room, but the bastards didn’t even give
me a chance to get my body armour off. . .
The bastards were two tall, humourless plain
clothed goons from Internal Affairs. They were wearing old fashioned black woollen
sports jackets over white shirts and matching red ties. One had a ginger peeler
tache, the other a black one.
“Constable Duffy?” Ginger Tache asked in a vague
Scottish accent.
“Yes?”
“Come us with us to Interview Room 2,” he said.
“Can you hold on a minute?” I said and made them
wait while I took off my kit.
I followed them along the concrete corridor to
the interrogation room, normally reserved for suspects. They were in there with
Constable Jimmy McFaul. Jimmy had evidently spilled his guts about something
because there were tears in his eyes and he couldn’t look at me.
I had no idea what this could be about. The
cannabis I had lifted from the evidence room in Carrickfergus? But that was a
long time ago and what had Jimmy to do with that?
“Have a seat, Duffy,” Ginger Tache said.
“Can I get a drink? I’ve been on foot patrol
along the border. Thirsty work, but you proud boys in Internal Affairs wouldn’t
know about that, would you?” I said and went back outside, got a can of Coke
from the machine and put it against my forehead. I popped the can, took a big
drink and joined them again.
I sat next to McFaul. “What’s going on Jimmy?” I
asked him.
His eyes were fixed on his boots.
“Were you driving a police Land Rover on the
Lower Island Road, Ballycarry at approximately 9.45 P.M. on the night of December
20th?” Black Tache asked.
“What?”
“You were the only Land Rover on the road that
night. There’s no point in denying it,” Ginger Tache added.
“Your mate has told us everything. You were on
the road and you were driving and you hit someone and you didn’t stop,” the
other goon said.
“Jimmy, you said I was driving?” I asked
him.
Jimmy said nothing and kept looking at the space
where his lying eyes intersected with the floor.
“You hit someone, Duffy. From what Constable
McFaul says you didn’t even realise it, but you hit a man,” Black Tache said.
“Is he ok?” I asked.
“You knocked him into the sheugh with the wing
mirror. He was shook up and he broke a finger, but he’ll live. Twenty year old
lad on his way back home from football practice. He had his rucksack on his
back. You hit that. That’s maybe what saved him from a more serious injury.”
“Thank God for that,” I said.
“He’s still going to sue us though isn’t he?”
Ginger Tache said.
“I don’t know what the Ghost of Fuck Ups Past here
has told you but I wasn’t driving that night. I was in the back of the Rover
trying to stop Sergeant McGivvin from choking on his own vomit or puking on my green
union suit. Sergeant McGivvin will verify that.”
“We’ve already asked him. Sergeant McGivvin
doesn’t remember anything of the incident,” Black Tache insisted with a sleekit
smile. “So, it’s just your word against Constable McFaul.”
I nodded. So that was how it was going to be.
“Both of you are hereby suspended without pay
until the conclusion of this inquiry,” the big Scottish bastard said.
“You can keep your gun for personal protection,
but you are not permitted to leave Northern Ireland and you are not to report for duty,” Goon #2 added.
Jimmy accepted the verdict and slunk out of the
interview room. He had gotten his story in first. He was the grass and I was
going to be the fall guy. In other words I was completely screwed. Ginger Tache
sat down in Jimmy’s seat. “I’m Chief Inspector Slater,” he said, offering me
his hand.
I didn’t shake it. I knew this game of old. First
the stick, then the carrot up the arse. “What’s all this about?” I asked. “Just
tell me the bottom line.”
“The bottom line? It’s over for you, Duffy. You
are not being graded on a friendly curve. You should see your file, mate.
Christ on a bike. It’s got red flags all over it. You were lucky not to have
been kicked out in ‘82. You’ve been on probation ever since,” Slater said.
“I wasn’t driving the Land Rover,” I said.
“What do we care? You’re our boy for this month. A
nice juicy sergeant. All we need is our quota and you’re it,” Slater said.
“I wasn’t driving!” I insisted.
“Your mate Jimmy says you were. He’s clean and
we’ve got your dirty, dirty file clogging up the works.”
I lit a ciggie. “So it’s all been settled then
has it? I’m the scapegoat?”
“You’ve been in the RUC, what, eight years?”
Slater asked.
“Closer to nine,” I told him.
Slater leaned in towards me and smiled an ugly
yellow-fanged grin. “It doesn’t have to end in scandal, does it?” he said.
“Ok, give it to me. What’s the deal?” I asked.
“You’re not eligible for a pension or benefits
but we’ll give them to you if you accept full responsibility and quietly resign
without this becoming a big deal.”
“And if I don’t resign?” I asked.
Slater made the throat slitting gesture. “Full
disciplinary proceedings. Make no mistake: you will be found guilty and you
will be dismissed the force without severance or a pension. And don’t think
being a fenian will save you. In your short not so brilliant career you’ve
managed to piss off a lot of people.”
I nodded, stubbed out my cigarette on the desk and
got to my feet.
“I’ll
think about it,” I said.
Chapter 5 The Letter
The New Year. 1984. But there was no Big Brother watching
us. No one gave a pig’s arse. Ireland was an island floating somewhere in the
Atlantic that all sensible people wanted to drift even farther away, beyond
their shores, beyond their imaginations. . .
The year limped in. The days merged. One morning
it was sleet, the next rain.
I walked the town and when I got home I checked
the post to see if my dismissal papers had come through for me to sign. Carrickfergus
was a mess: large areas had been zoned for demolition and reconstruction. It
was EEC money and the locals saw it as a good thing but it wasn’t because it only
meant that we were high on the EEC list of Towns That Are In The Shitter.
I walked the streets and drank in the pub and
watched TV late into the night when it was all public information films warning
kids about the dangers of drowning in quarries or lifting up strange packages
which were really trip-wired explosives.
One
night the elderly woman across the terrace had some kind of seizure and started
screaming “He’s coming! He’s coming!” Who was coming was never explained, but
she had proclaimed it in such a convincing way that a minor panic had ensued
and the whole of Coronation Road had come out.
Another night we heard a two thousand pound bomb
in Belfast so clearly that it might have been at the end of the street.
Signs, portents, single magpies, black cats, bombs,
bomb scares, helicopter traffic. . .
Finally one morning a white envelope sitting on
the hall mat.
I took it to the living room and stirred the
embers in the fireplace. I lit a fag, took a deep breath and ripped it open. A
boilerplate full “confession” to be signed, notarised and returned to RUC
Headquarters in Belfast.
The
terms were comparatively generous. In recompense for an admission of wrong
doing I would take early retirement and receive a pension although I hadn’t put
in enough time.
I read through the document twice, poured myself
an emergency Glenfiddich and signed everything that needed to be signed.
At nine I went into Carrickfergus and found Sammy
McGuinn, my barber, who was also a notary public. Sammy was the town’s only
communist and it was he who had turned me on to the strange delights of Radio
Albania. He read the document and shook his head. “I know you don’t see it now,
Sean, but this is a very good thing. As a member of the police you were nothing
more than a lackey in a tyrannical government oppressing the will of the
people. A Catholic too! Smart lad like you.”
“It was a job, Sammy. A job I was good at.”
“Power
is bad for the soul!” he said and went on to talk about Lord Acton Jurgen
Habermas and the Stanford Prison Experiment.
“Yeah,
could you just notarise the form for me, Sammy?”
“Of
course,” he said and added his seal and signature while muttering something
about Thatcher and Pinochet.
“I
can see you’re down, I’ll throw in a hair cut,” he said and put on the happiest
music he could think of which was Mozart’s symphony number 40.
Mrs
Campbell saw me coming out of the barber’s: “In getting your hair done, Mr
Duffy?”
“I
don’t get me hair ‘done’. I get it cut,” I replied dourly.
I crossed the street to the post office, bought a
first class stamp, fixed it to the return envelope, mailed the letter and just
like that I was off the force.
Chapter 6 The Visitors
Time moved on. Days to weeks. Weeks to months.
Cold February. Damp March. As Ezra Pound says, life goes by like a field mouse,
not even shaking the grass. Usually I went to the library and read the papers:
parochial news, fossilized editorials, a narrow frame of reference. I sometimes
checked out classical LP’s and did nothing until six o’clock when it was seemly
to get quietly hammered on Polish vodka or County Antrim poteen, listening to Wagner
or Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. Strange millennial music for strange millennial
times.
I
went to the dole office and they told me that there was no point signing on.
With my retirement money coming in I would be means tested and would not be
eligible for any other kind of income support. The unemployment officer told me
I should move to Spain or Greece or Thailand or someplace where my monthly
check from the RUC would go a long way.
I felt that this was good advice and I got a few
books on Spain out of the library.
I
walked the streets. Observed. Observed like a detective. Kids playing football.
Kids painting death’s head murals on gable walls. Fiddle players and cellists
outside the bank busking for coppers. Men in the High Street offering to recite
you any poem you could think of for the price of a cup of tea.
One evening in the pub I got in a fight. Standard
fare. Old geezer bumped me. I said excuse me, pal. Out came the fisty cuffs. I
got him with a left and before I knew what was happening the bastard had jabbed
me five times with his right. Chin, stomach, kidneys, stomach again. . .He must
have been sixty if he was a day. He helped me to my feet and bought me a drink
and span me a yarn about winning a middleweight belt and training John Wayne
for his performance as an ex boxer in The
Quiet Man. It was a likely story but I was so addled I couldn’t tell if it
was legit or bollocks. . .I went home in a taxi, drank a vodka gimlet, took 10
mg of Valium, half a dozen aspirin and went to bed.
In the wee hours I woke and looked at the aspirin
bottle next to me and wondered if this had been a cowardly, half hearted
suicide attempt. Cowardly because I
still had my service revolver, which as an ex policeman, I was allowed to keep
for up to a year after I’d left the force. That was the way to do it. Point blank
with a hollow point .38 slug straight across the hemispheres.
My guts ached and I walked to Carrick hospital
and a surprisingly full waiting room. Lynchian post midnight bus station
characters. The Open University on a black and white TV. A beardy physicist:
“Life is a thermodynamic disequilibrium but entropy will take us all in the
end. . .”
Yeah.
My guts were killing me so they put me on a drip.
The doctor on call said that I would live but that I wasn’t to mix my medicines.
He gave me a leaflet on depression. I went home, wrapped the bed sheets around
me and went into the landing. My newly installed central heating had sprung a
leak and the repair man had said that he needed to get a part from Germany to
overhaul the whole organ-like apparatus. It would take weeks, he explained,
maybe over a month, so I’d rented another paraffin heather and in truth I liked
it better. The paraffin heater was my shrine and I bathed in its warmth, its
sandalwood aroma and the light of its magenta moon.
I lay before it and let the hot air wash over me
like a blanket.
A long time ago I had killed a man with a heater like
this.
No. Was that me? Did such a thing really occur?
Or was it a fragment, a dream. . .
Oarless boats. . .Dream ships. . .The half light
of the wolf’s tail.
Dawn.
I
went downstairs.
Rain.
Sky the colour of a litter box. An army helicopter skimming the dogged brown
hills.
I
caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I was skinny, scabby, pale. My
nails were long and dirty. My hair was unkempt, thick, black, with grey above
both ears and on the sideburns. I looked like the poster boy for an anti heroin
ad. Not that I’d go that route. Not yet. And speaking of the exotic gifts of
the Orient. . .Wasn’t there a. . .
I rummaged in the rubbish bin under the kitchen
sink and found a roach with an inch of cannabis still left in it. I made a
coffee and topped it with a measure of Black Bush. I went back into the living
room, searched among the albums until I got the Velvet Underground & Nico. I put on Venus In Furs, drank the coffee, lit the roach off the paraffin
heater flame and inhaled. Paraffin. Hashish. John Cale’s viola. Lou Reed’s
voice.
Revived
somewhat I went outside and picked up the milk bottles. There was a strange car
four doors down on the Coronation Road bend. A white Land Rover Defender with
two shadowy figures inside. A man and a woman, she in the driver’s seat. I made
a mental note of the car, popped the top off the gold topped milk and poured it
into my coffee mug. I stared at the car and drank. It began to drizzle from a
dishwater sky.
“Jesus is Lord!” another one of my enthused
neighbours yelled as a morning greeting. I took a final look at the car, closed
the door and went back into the living room.
“I am tired, I am weary. I could sleep for a
thousand years,” Lou Reed sang as I lay down. The music ended, the stylus
lifted, moved an inch to the left and the song began again.
There was a faint creaking sound from outside.
Someone at the gate. The post or the paper or—
I grabbed the revolver from my dressing gown
pocket and checked that it was loaded. But somehow I knew that the people in
the Land Rover were not going to be terrorist assassins. . .
I heard voices and then a confident rap on the
door knocker.
I went into the hall, looked through the fisheye
peephole every cop had installed as a necessary precaution.
The man was a tall, balding, slightly harassed-looking
guy who would make an ideal “innocent bystander injured in shooting” story for
the news. He was wearing a blue suit and his shoes were shined to autistic
levels of perfection. He was about 25. She woman was brown haired, pale, thin,
grey eyed. Somewhere around thirty. No lipstick, makeup, jewellery. She was
wearing a black sweater, a short black skirt and black low heeled shoes. She
wasn’t pretty, not classically so, but I could see how some men would lose
their heads for her (some women too). There was an intensity, a self possession
to her that was uncommon.
I put the .38 back in my dressing gown pocket and
opened the door.
“Mr Duffy?” the man asked with an English accent.
“Yes.”
“May we come in for a moment?”
For just a sec I wondered if they were, in fact,
a really good hit team. It would be the sort of thing a really good team would
do. Ask if they could come in and when the door was safely closed and your back
turned, plug you. . .but they were almost certainly those English Jehovah’s
Witnesses that I’d heard everyone complaining about down the fish and chip
shop.
“Aye, go into the living room, just to the right
there. Do you want tea?”
Both of them shook their heads. Perhaps, like
Mormons, they didn’t drink tea or coffee.
“Are you sure you don’t want any? The kettle’s on,”
I shouted.
“No thank you,” the woman said.
I made myself a mug, poured a packet of chocolate
digestives onto a plate and carried it back into the living room.
She had taken the leather chair and he had been
relegated to the sofa.
They took a biscuit each. Missionaries didn’t
deserve the Velvet Underground so I put on Lou Reed’s fuck-you masterpiece, Metal Machine Music, an album of
feedback loops and screeching guitars.
“Do we have to have the music?” the man asked.
I nodded. “Of course! In case they’re
listening,” I said.
“In case who’s listening?” the man wondered.
I pointed vaguely at the sky and put my finger to
my lips. I sat down, dipped a chocky biscuit in the tea and ate.
“So. . .Jehovah,” I said.
“Who?” the man asked and blinked so slowly you
wondered if Lou Reed had given him a mini stroke.
I brought the tea cup to my lips and nodded at
the lass. I looked into her strange pale eyes and suddenly remembered that we
had met before.
I froze in mid drink. You know poker, don’t you?
So you know what’s it like when you’re playing Texas Hold Em and you’re sitting
there with a three and a five off suit and it’s the big blinds and you’re short
stacked and the dealer spreads the flop and it’s a two, a four and a six. .
.and just like that you’ve gone from the shit box seat to the bird dog seat in
the blink of an eye. The blink of a bloody eye. . .
And now I was feeling slightly foolish sitting
here in my dressing gown and fluffy slippers.
“We’ve met, haven’t we?” I said to her.
“I don’t think so,” she said in a refined English
accent with an ever so slight foreign echo to it.
I got up and turned off Mr Reed. “Oh yeah we’ve
met before. Not a hundred yards from here in Victoria Cemetery, in 1982. You
left me a note about a case I was working on. You’re MI5, aren’t you?” I said.
Neither of them had any idiosyncrasies that would
render them vivid but that was the point, wasn’t it? I had only seen her for a
fleeting moment and her hair was a different colour, but it was her. The fact
that I was right was communicated only by a momentary eye twitch and a slight
pursing of the lips.
“Any chance of getting some names?” I asked.
“I’m Tom,” the man claimed.
“And I’m Kate,” the woman claimed.
I took a big gulp of the sweet tea and set it
down on the coffee table.
“So, Tom, Kate,” I began. “Exactly how badly are
you fucked and why do you think I can help you get unfucked? There are plenty
of coppers. Plenty of good coppers. What is it that I bring to the table? Eh?”
I gave the man a wink and his lip curled in distaste.
He didn’t like my new found pantomime joviality. She, however, smiled. “You
bring several things, Sean. First, you’re very good at what you do. Second we
don’t want the man we’re looking for to know that we’re making a special effort
to find him; of course he knows that the police are after him, but if two
people like Tom and myself were to go around asking questions. . . Well, that
just might set the alarm bells ringing a bit louder than we’d like. And third
and most important of all, the personal.
You actually know the individual that we’re seeking.”
“You went to school with him,” Tom added.
I digested this information. Part two was a half
truth. She and Tom wouldn’t be going around asking questions – they’d have
proxies in the RUC or Special Branch to do that. But MI5 were like those
English officials in Raj who could never completely trust their Sepoy soldiers.
The RUC was leaky and unreliable, whereas I was safely outside the system. I
would be grateful to have a job. Grateful and pliant.
I sipped some more tea, had another biscuit and
lit a cigarette. Of course it was obvious who they were talking about: I had
only been to school with one man that MI5 could possibly be interested in and
that man was Dermot McCann.
“Mr Duffy, if I could just suggest a—” Kate
began, but I cut her off.
“You see the thing is, love, I’ve retired. I’d like
to help you but you’ve arrived too late. I’m putting the house on the market, I’m
selling up and I’m moving to Spain. I’ve picked out a nice wee spot with a view
of the Med and with my RUC pension coming in every month I’ll be sitting
pretty.”
“What will you do with your time?” Tom asked.
“Nothing. Relax. Listen to music. Did you know
that Haydn wrote 104 symphonies? Who’s heard more than half a dozen of them?”
Kate bit her lip and looked at me benevolently. “Look,
Sean, we deeply regret the way you have been treated in the last year.”
“Who’s we?”
“We work for the Security Service as you
intuited.” Kate said.
I was excited now but I let my anger bubble
through: “It’s easy to say that you deeply regret it but you didn’t
actually lift a finger to help me, did you?”
“It wasn’t our purview,” Kate said.
“Or maybe you caused the whole thing, eh? Maybe
you’ve done it to get me on the way down and then you chaps swoop in as my saviours
from across the sea? If that’s the case, I’m afraid its backfired pretty fucking
spectacularly. I’ve moved on. I’ve moved on mentally and spiritually and very
soon I’ll have moved on geographically too. I’m done with Northern Ireland and
the Troubles and Thatcher and MI5 and this whole disagreeable decade. I’m very
happy to take my wee bit of hard earned scratch and go to Spain,” I said.
Tom looked concerned but after a moment’s thought
Kate shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
I set my tea cup on the mantle, stubbed out the
cigarette in the dolphin ash tray and rubbed my chin.
“No, believe me, I’m leaving. I’m like Macavity
the fucking Mystery Cat. I’m not here. I’m already gone.”
Kate sighed, waiting for the histrionics to be
done with.
I slipped in the dagger. “And if you want me to
locate Dermot McCann for you before I
go it’s going to come at a very high price.”
Tom was shocked to hear the near the name Dermot McCann so early in the
conversation but Kate merely arched an eyebrow.
“What price?” she asked.
And now we had the 64000 dollar question. What
the hell did I want?
“Full reinstatement to the rank of detective inspector. Full remission of
pay and seniority. My record to be expunged of any wrong doing. A posting to a police station of my choosing. And
something else. . .”
“What?” Kate asked.
“An apology for the way I’ve been treated. An
apology from the top.”
“The Chief Constable?”
“From Thatcher.”
“From Mrs Thatcher?” Tom asked, amazed at my
chutzpah.
“Well not from fucking Dennis.”
“You must be out of your mind, chum!” Tom
exclaimed, his eyes bulging in his head.
“That’s what I want. Take it or fucking leave
it.”
“You know we could make things very unpleasant
for you,” Tom said.
I got to my feet and got close to him. Practically
nose to nose. “No mate, you don’t want to be starting in with the threats,
that’s the wrong tack completely,” I said.
Kate cleared her throat, stood and brushed
imaginary crumbs from her blouse.
“I assume a letter of regret signed by the Prime
Minister would be sufficient?” she asked in a business-like voice.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Well we’ll have to see what we can do then,
won’t we?” she said.
She waved Tom to his feet.
I saw them to the front door. “We’ll be in
touch,” Kate said.
“You better make it soon, love, I hear Valencia
is lovely this time of year.”
“Actually, it’s surprisingly inclement,” she said
and walked briskly down the garden path.
