“What was at Scavanni’s house?” I asked scribbling in my notebook.
He opened his mouth, closed it, looked away.
“There’s more, come on, Walter, out with it.”
“No. There’s not much more. That same night, one of the higher-ups phoned looking for Tommy — about an hour after he left home — and I told him what Tommy had said.”
“What do you mean ‘higher-up’?”
“One of the big bosses. But you won’t be getting his name from me, ever.”
“Do you mean one of the big bosses in the IRA?”
“Yes.”
“How big?”
“The top. The very top. That’s all I’m going to say.”
I looked at Crabbie. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing either.
“Ok, Walter, so you told this big boss what exactly?”
“That Tommy had gone out already. That he was going to see Billy White and Freddie Scavanni.”
I wrote it down. “And then what happened?”
“Well, Tommy didn’t come back and the bosses called again at midnight looking for him and I said I hadn’t seen him yet. A lot of times Tommy will do an all-nighter for the boys so I wasn’t that worried. But then the bosses starting calling again in the morning and all that afternoon. And I began to get really concerned, and then that evening a couple of thugs wearing balaclavas knocked at my door and they took me away for the third degree …”
He hesitated and then stopped speaking as if he had just caught himself doing something terribly wrong. “Informer” has always been a poisonous word in Ireland and these days “informer” was anyone who so much as opened their mouth in the presence of a policeman.
“Ok, Sergeant Duffy, that’s it. You know what I know. Please leave and please don’t ever come back,” Walter said wearily.
He pushed me out onto the porch.
“Wait, a minute, Walter, I-”
Before I could get another word out he shut the door.
I stood there for a moment and then turned to Crabbie. “Either of those names ring a bell?”
“Don’t know who Freddie Scavanni is but Billy White is a Prod paramilitary in Newtownabbey. UVF divisional commander for East Antrim.”
“Why would an IRA man be going to see a UVF divisional commander?”
“Lots of reasons.”
“Drugs?”
“Aye, dividing up territory for drugs, arranging truces, sorting out territory for protection rackets, that kind of thing. But the thing is, Sean, the question we have to ask ourselves, is why Billy White is seeing some low-ranking IRA guy?”
“And we know the answer, don’t we? Because Tommy Little isn’t some low-ranking IRA guy at all, is he?”
“Nope. I reckon he isn’t,” Crabbie agreed.
We drove back to Carrick station and while Crabbie filled in Matty I looked up the file on Billy White:
Born 1947, Belfast. Smart kid. Methodist College. 10 O-Levels. 2 A-levels. 1966-71 moves to Rhodesia where he joins the police. 1971 expelled from Rhodesia for unspecified reasons. 1972 arrested for receiving stolen goods in London. ’72-’74 Her Majesty’s Pleasure in various English Stretches. ‘74 returns to Belfast. Joins UVF, arrested for attempted murder. Witness disappears. Never arrested again. Suspected hitman, suspected bagman, suspected narco distributer. Current UVF rank: senior commander and quartermaster.
The file didn’t say what Billy did now for the UVF but if he was a liaison officer with other paramilitary groups it would make him almost untouchable.
I looked up the file on Freddie Scavanni:
Born 1948, Ravenna, Italy. Relocated to Cork 1950 and to Belfast 1951. Father one of the many Italian immigrants who came to Ireland just after the war. Educated on a scholarship at the Portora Royal School, Enniskillen. 12 O-Levels. 3 A-Levels. Another smart kid. Interned for IRA membership 1972 and released in 1973. BA in journalism from Queen’s University Belfast 1976. Currently Sinn Fein press officer. Current IRA rank: unknown.
I closed both files and put them on my desk.
I called up Sinn Fein HQ and asked to speak to Scavanni but they told me to take a long, spiritually fulfilling walk into the nearest peat bog.
“Oi, Crabbie, remember when the chief said that it was great that we had a nice wee normal murder case for once that didn’t involve the paramilitaries or have a sectarian angle?”
“Yeah,” he said sourly, looking at his watch.
“I’m not sure we have that any more.”
I rubber-banded the files on Scavanni and White and chucked them over to him. He read them and whistled.
It was five o’clock. “Tomorrow’s going to be a busy day, mate,” I said. “You better go home.”
“Busier than today?” he asked.
“Oh aye. We’re going to interview Lucy Moore’s ma and da and her husband in the Maze to close that investigation and then we’re going to have to interview our two new best friends: Freddie and Billy.”
“I’ll be late in, Sean. I have to go to Derry tomorrow for me Uncle Tom’s funeral,” Crabbie said.
“All right then, it’ll be a busy day for Matty.”
“I’ll write those names up on the scoresheet.”
Crabbie wrote FREDDIE SCAVANNI and BILLY WHITE on the whiteboard.
He put on his coat. “Is it really ok if I go on home?”
“Aye.”
“What about me?” Matty asked.
“Jesus, you’re here? Where are you?”
“Lying on the floor by the radiator.”
“Why?”
“My back’s killing me. I must have done something to it. I could barely reel in that ten-pounder yesterday. I should be off on sick leave.”
“No sick leave! Did you find out where the homosexuals go to do their business?”
“No.”
“Did you find where Lucy Moore’s been hiding since Christmas?”
“No.”
“Did you find out if there was a link between Tommy Little and Andrew Young?”
“No.”
“Did you find out what Tommy Little really did for a living?”
“No.”
“Brilliant. All right, you can go home too.”
Matty grinned and thanked me. When they were both gone, I turned on the portable TV to catch the Six O’Clock Northern Ireland News. Our story was only the fifth lead, behind a bus bombing, the Royal Wedding, the hunger strikes and an attack on an army helicopter: Two homosexual men had been shot in possibly related incidents. The BBC, in their wisdom, interviewed Belfast City Councillor George Seawright of the DUP, who, as a responsible elected representative called homosexuals an “abomination under God deserving of the very worst torments of hell”.
I turned down the sound and called Special Branch and asked them to send me their latest intel files on the IRA High Command and Army Council. Then I called the Northern Ireland Prison Service to ask how you went about interviewing a prisoner on hunger strike.
Until Heather Fitzgerald’s shift ended I killed some time working up my psych profile of the killer, but there wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Male 25–50. Intelligent. Into classical music. Into mythology. Knowledge of Greek? That didn’t really narrow it down as I’d learned Latin and Greek as did most kids who went to Catholic school or a Proddy Grammar.
At seven o’clock Heather and I walked to the Taj Mahal Indian Restaurant on North Street. We were the only customers.
She had changed into her civvies: a black sweater, long brown skirt and short-heeled boots. She’d kept her end up and she looked lovely.
I ordered half a dozen things off the menu and instead of any of that they just brought us what they’d already made. The waiter grew strangely evasive when I asked for details so I didn’t press him. She pecked at her food like a bird, eating practically nothing. I hadn’t had a proper meal in days and I scarfed what she left.
We were both on three Kingfishers when we walked hand in hand down to the Dobbins on West S
treet. She wanted a gin and tonic and I got a pint of bass.
Two more drinks and we were getting on famously.
She went off to the toilet and I stood by the fireplace watching the peat bricks crack.
“I thought you might be here,” a voice said.
I turned round. It was Laura.
“I came looking for you,” she said. “I wanted to ask you if you wanted to go to the cinema this week.”
“I thought the IRA had blown up all the cinemas.”
“Not all of them,” she laughed.
“What’s playing?”
“Chariots of Fire? Have you heard of it?”
“Some kind of Ben Hur remake?”
“It’s about the olympics.”
Just then Heather came back from the toilet. She saw me talking to Laura and immediately put her arm through mine and kissed me on the cheek.
Laura blinked a couple of times.
“Laura, this is my friend, Heather. Heather, this is Laura,” I said.
The two women looked at one another and said nothing.
Heather put her hand on my cheek, turned my face to hers and kissed me on the lips.
When the kiss was done, Laura, naturally, was gone.
“Let’s finish our drinks and get out of here,” Heather said.
We went outside and called a black taxi.
It took us to her house in the wilds of Greenisland.
It was a surprisingly big house for a young reserve constable.
If I hadn’t seen her in the RUC van with us today, I would have been thinking: oh shit, IRA honey trap.
She stripped off her clothes revealing fishnet stockings and a black basque.
What the fuck is this? I was thinking when she grabbed my cock through my trousers.
“We were nearly killed today,” she said.
“Not really.”
“Doesn’t it turn you on?” she said.
“You turn me on,” I replied and kissed her again.
She tasted of gin and better times.
I kissed her breasts and her belly and laid her down on the bed.
“Fuck me, you bitch!” she moaned.
I didn’t need any more encouragement.
We had hard, rampant animal sex and then she climbed on top of me and we fucked again.
I fell asleep until 1.30 when she shook me hard.
“My husband gets back from the night shift at two,” she said. “Get your clothes on and get the fuck out of here.”
“Are you serious?”
“He’s a sheet welder, he’ll fucking break you in half, wee man, now get out.”
I had to walk five miles home in the rain.
When I got back to #113 Coronation Road I was shattered. I ripped off my wet clothes, lit the upstairs paraffin heater and put on the Velvet Underground and Nico. I slid the stylus across to “Venus in Furs” and clicked the repeat switch. When John Cale’s crazy viola and Lou Reed’s ostrich guitar kicked in, I went to the bookcase found the Britannica Encyclopaedia of Art and skipped through the centuries until I came to the painting of Orpheus in the Underworld by Jan Velvet Brueghel. I lay in front of the heater as the rain came on and the wind rattled the bathroom windows. I looked at Brueghel’s hell: flying demons, fires, tormented souls and in the foreground two ladies in rather nice frocks.
I lay there and let the minutes wash over me. The minutes. The hours. All eternity. I thought of Orpheus searching for his beloved in the realms of Hades. I thought of Laura and Heather. I thought of Tommy and Walter. I looked for meaning. But there was no meaning. It was nonsense. All of it. There was method but no key. They’re all just playing with us, I thought. And then at three o’clock exactly the lights went out again.
12: BITING AT THE GRAVE
If the papers were to be believed there were two things going on in the world: the Royal Wedding and the IRA hunger strikes; one focal point was the baroque dome of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, the other was the middle of a sour, boggy portion of the Lagan Valley just west of Lisburn — the Maze Prison.
The Maze was built in the aftermath of the disastrous Operation Demetrius in 1971 when hundreds of IRA “suspects” had been arrested in a desperate attempt to stop The Troubles from escalating. Initially they were kept in huts at the former RAF base of Long Kesh, but eventually the Maze prison was built around them with its massive perimeter fence and eight concrete “H Blocks”.
Many of the internees had had no links whatsoever to the IRA but that had certainly changed after six months or a year’s detention by the British. The Brits have always been experts at pouring gasoline on every situation in Ireland: The Easter Rising, Bloody Sunday, Internment — all of them excellent recruiting tools for the radicals.
After Internment ended and the prisoners were released it was decided that IRA volunteers would only get jail time if they were actually convicted of a crime: murder, conspiracy to cause explosions, possession of illegal weapons, etc. Initially, however, IRA prisoners had been granted a Special Category Status because their offences were considered to be political in nature. But then in 1976, on a whim, this status had been revoked by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. The prisoners had protested in various ways, most famously by refusing to wear prison clothes and smearing excrement on their cell walls.
In 1979 the Tories were returned to power but of course Mrs Thatcher had refused to “give in to terrorists” and would not backtrack on the Special Category Status. The hunger strikes had begun. I’d been sympathetic. Bobby Sands, Frankie Hughes and the others were merely attempting to return things to the status quo ante of 1976.
Bobby Sands’s election to parliament and death after sixty-six days on hunger strike had been the media event of the decade in Ireland and IRA recruiters were now having to turn away hundreds of young men and women. It did my heart no good at all to know that I was working for the same people who had been responsible for such utter incompetence.
Matty drove up to the Maze Prison walls, which were grey and thick and topped with coils of razor wire.
I turned off the tape of Led Zeppelin’s Presence album that despite a dozen listens, still sounded crap. Matty breathed a sigh of relief.
It was raining hard and the prison officer did not come out of the guard hut to check the warrant card I was holding up.
That too inspired zero confidence.
“All you need is a hijacked police Land Rover and anybody could get into this joint,” I muttered to Matty who was sitting beside me in the front seat. Neither of us were even in uniform. I was wearing a black polo-neck sweater under my leather jacket and he was wearing some kind of white pirate blouse thing that he must have seen Adam Ant sporting on Top of the Pops.
The thick steel gate slid across on rollers and I drove to a small car park in the lee of a brown concrete watch tower.
“It’s going to be terrible in here, isn’t it?” Matty said.
I nodded grimly. I could only imagine what the hospital wing of the prison looked like with a dozen emaciated men hooked up to drips — dying by heartbreaking degrees while family members wept and priests gave extreme unction.
“Aye, Matty, I think so.”
Fortunately we’d come early. It wasn’t nine so the hacks wouldn’t be out of bed yet and the rain had kept away the demonstrators we’d been told to expect outside the prison gates.
Scowling, a chubby, blue-faced man regarded me through bullet-proof glass.
“Sergeant Duffy of Carrick RUC. I’m here to see Seamus Moore,” I said.
“Sign here,” he replied, passing me a clipboard through a horizontal slit.
I signed and passed the clipboard back.
He did not inspect my ID. I gave Matty a wry look and shook my head. A buzzer sounded and a metal gate opened.
With that we were into the main prison compound.
There were eight H Blocks in separate wings for Republican and Loyalist prisoners — in fact separate wings for the various Republican a
nd Loyalist groups. There was a Provisional IRA wing, an INLA section, a UVF section, a UFF/UDA wing and areas for various other smaller factions.
We parked the Rover and got out.
“Sergeant Duffy?” an aged, grey moustachioed, sad-faced man in a prison officer’s uniform asked me from under a giant black umbrella.
“That’s me.”
“I’m Davey Childers, RUC liaison.”
We shook hands.
“We’ve arranged to have you meet Moore in the visitor’s area.”
“He’s not in the hospital?”
“Oh no, he’s only been on hunger strike for a week. That’s not necessary yet.”
I looked at Matty and we were both relieved.
We went through a series of narrow-fenced easements topped with razor wire until we came to a bunker-like one storey building that was also surrounded by a razor-wire fence.
This place was not like the Victorian prisons of England with their imposing red-brick and neo-gothic architecture that was supposed to impress inmates with the power of the state; no, this place looked cobbled together, shoddy and temporary and the only thing it impressed upon you was how current British policy on Ireland was dominated by short-term thinking.
We walked through a set of double doors, checked in our weapons, patted an amiable sniffer dog and immediately saw a fairly healthy looking Seamus Moore sitting waiting for us at a long Formica table. He was bearded, long-haired and wearing pyjamas. He was smoking a cigarette and drinking what looked like a mug of tea.
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