Oak and Stone

by Dave Duggan

  He tapped the paper, pushed his chair out of his way and walked round the table, straight out the door and onto the Strand Road, where he turned right. When he was past the window, I gulped the last of the coffee, bolted the three steps to the back of the café, met Francesca at the end of the chip fryer counter, took the phone and business card she passed to me and exited onto Clarendon Street, via the back lane, just in time to see Dalzell climb into a taxi on the far side of the traffic lights. I stepped against the side of the building as the taxi came through the lights towards me, then sped up the steep climb of Clarendon Street, before catching a green light at the top, and briskly turning left to head in the direction of Bogside, Brandywell, Creggan, Rosemount. I couldn’t even guess. I got the registration number and the company phone number. I didn’t recognise them.

  I looked at the business card. Standard size and shape, printed in the hundreds from a ‘free’ website. A fine purple border. A seated skeleton, in the top right corner. His name – William Dalzell – in a block font. Landline and mobile phone numbers. An email address w.dalzell@dalzellfinder.com, a Twitter handle @dalzellfinder, and a web address dalzellfinder.com.

  He was fully covered and, for a retired cop, perfectly up to date. I took a small evidence bag from my pocket and slid the business card inside. Then I scanned the photos on my phone.

  Francesca had done me proud. There were small groups of young staff members in twos and threes, laughing and clutching at each other. There was a fuzzy selfie, with Gino, looking paternally bemused, unconsciously photo-bombing in the near background. Then there was Dalzell, set back, in two shots. One captured his left flank and the side of his head, turned away from the camera, his right hand brushing his hair over his ear. The other, a group of three, taken at a better angle from the ice-cream counter, included the young girl who cleared our table, holding a tray before her like a votive offering. She was standing beside Dalzell. Another young staff member leaned into the picture holding two fingers above the tray holder’s head, rabbit-ears’ wise. The third member of the group was Dalzell, looking full-on into the lens, arms folded across his chest, eyes almost fully receded into their sockets. Only if you looked very closely could you make out his right hand resting on his left forearm, fingers closed in a soft fist, but with the middle finger pointing singularly upwards in the universal ‘fuck you’ gesture.

  I closed the phone and turned my face to the sun. I had an executed footballer; a football club chairman, cold as a ledger; a nosey parker and a taxi driver. I’d have to tell my boss that, if there was a story, it wasn’t one I knew.

  Thoughts of the river came into my mind, as my skin heated up. I returned to the café to pay my bill and to get an ice-cream cone to take away.

  TWO

  When I returned to the office, after enjoying my ice-cream on the river walk, I met a cascade of my colleagues running down the corridor in the opposite direction. Only the section administrator, Sharon, whose many gold-medals in kick-boxing belie her permanent damsel-in-distress pout, ignored the rush.

  ‘Boys in heat, Slevin,’ she said, as I passed her desk. ‘Boys in heat.’

  I stood against the wall to let the flow subside. I was still digesting my encounter with Dalzell and the gravy ring lunch, so I burped loudly as Hammy, my boss, bowled towards me, shuffling expertly into his branded PS(N) jacket.

  ‘Don’t vomit on the new carpet, Slevin. You’re with me. Hetherington’s driving. Safari-time!’

  The name ‘Hetherington’ didn’t register with me until the section’s newest intake trotted towards me. He wore the same jacket as Hammy, but had managed only to get one arm through a sleeve. Still on the run, he lunged his left arm repeatedly in the direction of the other sleeve, which flopped derisively beside him.

  I stuck an arm across his chest and stopped him, then, grabbing the errant sleeve, I stuffed his arm in. Hetherington caught his breath and said,

  ‘Thanks, Slevin. She’s in St. Columb’s Park. They caught her.’

  I had no chance to ask who they’d caught. Sharon was on the phone, so I couldn’t ask her. I looked down the corridor. It was empty. All the detective desks in the office were vacant. For a brief moment I wondered if I should get my PS(N) jacket, but decided against it and turned to follow Hetherington, now taking the exit stairs in loud bounds.

  The latest changes to policing had deepened the awkward re-alignment of the services on the island. That required a major re-branding. We are now Police Service (North), PS(N). Our colleagues are Police Service (South), PS(S). They still use their old name, An Garda Síochána. We don’t use any of our historical names. We even got new ranks. We are ceaselessly struggling to be new.

  As part of the re-branding, detectives were issued with jackets, bearing the new letters and logo: PS(N) in old gold on the dark green micro-lite water-proof fabric, over an intertwined garland of crowns, shamrocks, harps, laurels, sceptres and something that looks like a sausage but that we were assured was a scroll. The law, it seems. Our colleagues were issued with the same jackets, but with PS(S) over the garland. Sharon said we look like cops out of old NYPD web-flick re-runs she watches with her granddad when it’s her turn to handle his evening feed.

  I tend to do without the PS(N) jacket, favouring my light suede sports coat at this time of year. Hammy says I look like I wandered in from the Technical College next door, after abandoning a class of social science students, panting to hear my every word. He throws the education bone at me every now and then. One of the arrows in his personnel management armoury.

  One day, during a major case review, he fired a proper salvo.

  ‘What exactly are you doing here, Slevin? You and your doctorate and all. Do you want us to call you ‘doctor’? Some of us didn’t want you or your mates. They didn’t take to the latest convulsion. Mind you, it’s not the first, even since I strapped on the tools. If you’d told me twenty years ago that boys like you would be in the police, I’d have laughed. But then, the peace process rolled into town and, convulsion by convulsion, we arrived at the point where the Chief Constable put a shoulder to the heavy door to get you and the other desperadoes in. You should be up at that university there, Slevin, with all your academic mates, drinking lattés and talking tosh. But they wouldn’t have you. Oh, no, not a twelve year man, still smelling of cordite and fertiliser, maybe even a whiff of old-timey Semtex, no matter how many showers and scrubbings you had in Maghaberry. So you’re here in the shite, with us, the rough boys. Ah, well. Silk purse outta pig’s ears and all that. Never forget, Slevin. We love you. Really.’

  This was Hammy’s version of an ‘arm-around-the-shoulder’ to make a junior colleague feel welcome and fully part of the team.

  ‘What was the auld doctorate in again, Slevin? Wasn’t policing or criminology, I can tell you that, something that might be useful here. None of that good stuff. Oh, I never read it meself, but I hear the thesis is a wow. Got published in a book and all. Maybe even sold a few dozen copies.’

  A couple of hundred. I never corrected him. This was early in my days among the detectives. Hammy was standing in his beloved incident corner. Sharon said he wanted a full room adjoining his office but Finance vetoed that when the new wing was being built, so he corralled off a section of the main conference room using a jumble of partitions, suspended spotlights, two touch-screen consoles and an array of white boards and plexi-glass displays to give us focus for our primary investigations. And an auditorium for himself.

  ‘What was it again, Slevin?’

  When I didn’t answer, he pushed. ‘Go on. Remind us.’

  I had an A5 spiral notebook on my lap, open on a page criss-crossed with jottings rather than sentences.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ I said. ‘Did you say the latest victim was a member of the Travelling Community?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hammy. ‘Listen to that educated man now. The good old bon mot. “A member of the
travelling community.” Not, as many among you would say: a knacker, a gypo, a tinker, a stoke. You’ll do well here, Slevin. They’ll like you’ - he used his right index finger to point to the ceiling, indicating upstairs - ‘a man with your background and education. Chief material, there. Chief material.’

  That brought a gruff laugh from colleagues around me and Hammy, ever sensitive to the mood in the room, gauged it was an opportune time to drive us back into the work.

  That was my first case. And when I solved it, two old men, flanked by sons, nephews and grandsons, came into the police headquarters car-park in a small fleet of vans. Seven of them came up the stairs, with the two uniforms from the front desk chittering after them: ‘Do you have an appointment? Please wait here ... you can’t …’

  Sharon, ever alert, showed them into the main conference room and offered tea and coffee, which they politely declined. Then she brought me and Hammy in. The two old men shook my hand and, nodding like praying monks, patted me on the shoulder. Hammy stood off to the one side, awkward and beaming.

  A younger man, with hair as black as ebony and boy-band good looks, stepped forward.

  ‘Me family want to thank ye for what ye done for our Martin. Ye didn’t bring him back. No one can. But onny for ye, the man who dunnit’d be out and still at it now.’

  Then he paused and I knew that this part was personal, to him and to me.

  ‘We have our own ways. And ye have yeers. I mightn’t always see eye to eye with ye, but you were fair with us. And good for your word. You said you’d see him do time and you done that. Fair play to you.’

  He handed me a plump leather wallet.

  ‘Me father and me uncles, the whole lotta us, want ye to have this for your troubles.’

  I took the wallet and nodded. When it was obvious I wasn’t going to say anything, the old men shook my hand once more and the group of Travellers, stark as black swans on a frozen lake and forceful as a flotilla of gunboats, processed out of the room and down the stairs.

  Hammy gushed.

  ‘Jesus, Slevin, you coulda said something. You’re a made man now. A made man. Another feckin string to your bow. Friend of the Traveller.’

  He took the wallet from me and rifled through the notes inside.

  ‘‘Bout three hundred, maybe more, hang on, nearer four, I’d say. Mostly tenners. A good few twenties.’

  He returned the wallet to me and, leaving the room, called back.

  ‘Your shout, Slevin. A new outfit? A wee trip? Don’t forget the Christmas do. Good way to build up staff camaraderie.’

  Later I placed the wallet on Sharon’s desk, saying,

  ‘Hospice. Anonymous.’

  Two days later the empty wallet was on my desk under a pink sticky note, on which Sharon had written ‘sorted’. I looked closely at the wallet then, and saw how the stitching was strained and unravelling as in sutures on a wound. Across the front, in well-rubbed letters, I made out the text.

  MARTINS WALLET

  21

  NEVER EMPTY

  By the time I got down the stairs and into the yard, Hetherington was revving Hammy’s unmarked saloon. I got into the back, checked that Hammy couldn’t catch my eye in the rearview mirror and just about managed to get belted in as Hetherington engaged first and steeved the accelerator into the floor. The car leapt, nose-high, through the metal gates and onto the Strand Road, where a uniform, holding the traffic back, jumped sideways in fear of his life.

  ‘Give us the works, Hetherington,’ said Hammy. ‘The full audio-visual experience.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Down the Strand Road we raced; lights, klaxon and occasionally horn, blaring and blazing, until Hammy told Hetherington to lay off the horn.

  ‘We’re not in a rush home for our tea,’ he said.

  No one spoke as we sped over the Foyle Bridge. I could see the Lisahally docks and the sea in the distance to my left. The weather was benign. A pearly light glistened on the water. Oak trees on the riverbank, unruffled by breezes, held their stately poise. Towards the city, upriver, there were squalls and squibs of rain, a sense of a keen wind shovelling clouds east to west to cover the high ground of the walled city and lay their moisture on the stones.

  We arrived at the roundabout at the end of the bridge and Hammy barked,

  ‘Don’t go round to the main entrance. Go down Waterfoot Park, behind the hotel. There’s access to the riverside walk there.’

  I smiled to myself thinking that if I wasn’t in the back Hetherington might have snapped a salute along with his barked ‘Yes, sir!’ reply.

  We swung off the roundabout, cutting across two lanes, using the lights and horn again, and entered a quiet estate of detached houses and low-rise apartment buildings neatly arrayed on well-managed grounds that undulated down to the river. The road slalomed twice before Hetherington expertly niched the saloon into the one parking space possible between a Department of Agriculture, Fisheries, Forests and Wildlife (DAFFW) land-rover and a Wild Animal Response Team (WART) personnel carrier. I looked at the acronym and smiled once more. The job got better and better everyday. I knew the ‘she’ they’d caught now. Then, as the chill from the river made me pull my suede jacket closer round me and regret I hadn’t taken my PS(N) branded coat too, Hammy led us through a mass of vehicles parked beside the access to the riverside walkway.

  I followed Hammy and Hetherington through the ranks of vehicles. More DAFFW land rovers, oiled waterproofs thrown over seats, green wellies and waders slumped like tired beagles beside rear wheels. Men and women changing clothes. A clutch of three supped well-roasted coffee one of them poured from an industrial-sized flask into metal cups that shone like grenades in their hands. I almost went over to ask them for a cup, but Hammy, who had been listening hard on his phone while making occasional ‘aye, right. Yep, that’s okay’ noises as he walked, signed off and barked:

  ‘Hetherington, you’re on me. Slevin, I want you here. Don’t wander. Keep your eyes open. Wait for us and we’ll go back together.’

  Hetherington beamed at me before trotting after our boss, up the walkway and in the direction of whatever mystery we were chasing just then. And I did what my boss told me to do. I kept my eyes open, as best I could. When I yawned a film of water filled my eyes, as if I was crying. I never slept very well. Perhaps I had my allowance, in jail. I didn’t do gym. I only really woke up when I discovered books.

  These days I wake early and catch up on my report-writing on my off-site laptop. Being at Detective grade, I get two special-issue devices: a high-end laptop with appropriate security access codes and a hand-held compatible – my souped-up phone – with all systems and, again, security cleared to Detective level. Technos pull the phones in randomly, could be 6 weeks, could be a fortnight, handing you a new one at the same time. We’re supposed to back-up, but there’s a worrying couple of hours until all your data and settings are re-installed and any queries are registered.

  I pulled my current phone from my jacket pocket and checked status. I’d had it almost 24 hours and it was still ‘clean’, empty of my personal history. The screen lit up as I wiped my thumb across it. The sign-in screen appeared and I keyed in my name, officer number and access code. The screen went dark, then lit once more to show my front page with all the systems available. That was re-assuring. I thumbed the icon for Messages and once more the screen performed its light to dark to light shimmy and a list of messages in date/time order appeared. Third from the top a one-liner read:

  ‘IS alert. Contact.’

  A hissed ‘shite’ was my only response to Internal Security, as I pocketed my phone and walked over to the WART van I’d seen earlier. I recognised one of the men standing there, just receiving a cup of coffee. His easy stance and the edge of his mullet hair-style cascading out of his cap gave him away.

  ‘Howya, Tony?’

  When he tur
ned, his frown of enquiry quickly became a smile of greeting.

  ‘Slevin, you bollix. You’re not dead then?’

  I laughed and Tony continued.

  ‘Onny, a boy like you, crossed the line, even now, years after the bother, I was sure someone was going to do you.’

  ‘Could still happen. What’s WART doing here then?’

  ‘They needed a shooter. And that’s her there. Amy Miller, our dead-eye Daisy. I’m onny the scout leader. The young wans get all the action.’

  Amy Miller was stepping out of a camouflaged outer suit with a single deft movement, not needing to lean on the male colleague who stood beside her and to whom she handed the suit. Then she pulled off her cap and perched it on her colleague’s head, smiling. She was as tidy as a meadow sprite and as sturdy as a red squirrel.

  ‘One shot Amy, we call her. She did nice work today.’

  A rifle with a telescopic sight was propped against the front of the vehicle. A documenting officer was shooting video of it, then, on Amy’s ‘I’m ready’, he turned the camera on her. She spoke directly to it, giving her account of her role in the incident that brought us all there.

  ‘You’re in charge, Tony?’

  ‘Of our little crew here. Tony White, famed loyalist enforcer, turned Boys’ Brigade leader to this lot. Yours truly. Six, including me. Specialists. A hybrid of PS(N) and DAFFW. You went straight in at the deep end? Drugs, is it?’

  ‘Serious Crime Team. Here.’

  ‘SCT, eh? I thought ‘Drugs’. The suede jacket, you see. We’re out of Lisburn, the old Army barracks. Bit of a dump, but handy to Belfast and home.’

  Tony White, like me, was part of the experimental political ex-prisoner intake to PS(N) training. Four of us on the front page of the Belfast Telegraph, walking into the Police Training College. Photographers wanted us to carry notebooks. One even suggested schoolbags. Tony politely told him to ‘fuck off’. The four of us stood on the steps with the steel and concrete facade behind us, the garlanded cap badge centred above us. We looked like a suspects’ line-up in place for all the world to witness. Two republicans. Two loyalists. One woman. Only me and Tony made it to the end. The others left and I never heard anything more about them.