“How many people did you kill in Rhodesia, Billy?”
“More than enough, copper. More than enough,” he said chillingly.
I rubbed my chin. Was any of this relevant? He was a stone-cold killer but I knew that already. “You ever hear of a wee girl called Lucy Moore?”
“Who?”
“Do you know who Orpheus is?”
“What?”
“Are you a music lover, Billy?”
“Of course.”
“Do you like the opera?”
“The what?”
“Opera. Wagner. Puccini.”
“No fear.”
“Not your line?”
“Not my line.”
We looked at one another while Billy lit himself a cigarette. He offered me one and I took it. A plane was landing at the Belfast Harbour Airport and I watched it stick rigidly to its landing vector along the shore of Belfast Lough.
“Let me get this straight. Tommy Little came over to see you on Tuesday night at about eight o’clock. He was defusing a potentially serious dispute about who owned the heroin of a dead drug dealer. He stayed here for five minutes and then he left and you never saw him again.”
“That’s about right,” Billy said and again there was that look in his eyes that I didn’t quite like. If this was the truth it was not the whole truth.
“What did you do after Tommy left?”
“I played snooker until about twelve and then I went on home.”
“Witnesses?”
“Everybody in the club.”
“They’d swear on oath that you were the Shah of Iran.”
“That they would,” Billy laughed.
“How do you feel about queers, Billy?”
“Me personally?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Who cares what people get up to in their own bloody home.”
“Very enlightened. What would you do if you found out one of your boys was a queer?”
“You know what we’d do.”
“You’d kill him?”
“We’d have to. The higher-ups would demand it.”
The drizzle turned to rain.
“Are there any more questions?” Billy asked.
“One or two,” I said.
“Then we better go inside.”
We went to the stuffy back room. Billy turned off the TV and kicked out his grandfather. He sat behind the desk.
“Shane, get in here!” he called and his young, blond-haired assistant came in. Shane sat down next to Billy, facing us. He was winsome and pretty and annoying and perhaps there was even a shade of Jupiter and Gannymede. Perhaps.
“You are?” I asked Shane.
“Shane Davidson. Davidson with a D.”
“Sergeant Duffy wants to know if Tuesday night was the last we ever saw of Tommy Little?” Billy said.
Shane’s eyes narrowed. “Of course it is,” Shane said, looking at Billy with a glance I could not interpret. Matty saw it too and gave me the minutest nod.
“Holy shit, lads! You didn’t have a falling out with Tommy and fucking shoot him, did you?”
“Don’t you read the papers, mate? Tommy was killed by some nutcase doing in queers. Although I say nutcase, but the truth is, I’ll bet you most people think he’s doing everybody a favour,” Billy said.
“And besides, we know better than to fuck with Tommy Little!” Shane said.
“Aye, we do. The Great White Chiefs would kill us before the IRA ever did,” Billy added.
“What exactly did Tommy do for the IRA? What was his position?” I asked
Billy laughed and slapped his hand on the table. “Yon boy’s been dead four days and you don’t even know who he was? Christ, are you the Keystone Cops or what?”
“What was Tommy Little’s job for the IRA?” I insisted.
“You really don’t know?” Shane said again, sending his boss into hysterics.
“No.”
“Tommy Little was the head of the FRU,” Billy said.
“Tommy Little was the head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit?” I said incredulously.
“That he was.”
“That’s an Army Council position,” Matty gasped.
“So, you can see why anybody who killed Tommy would have to be a nutcase, wouldn’t you?” Billy said.
Yeah I could.
All the other angles had collapsed.
Tommy Little was the head of the FRU — the IRA’s internal security unit. The FRU was responsible for uncovering police informers and MI5 moles within the organization. They were the most feared group of men on the island of Ireland. Scarier than any of the paramilitaries, Special Branch or the SAS.
When the IRA got you, they’d kneecap you or shoot you in the head. When the FRU got you and they suspected that you were a police informer or a double agent the fun could last for a week. Torture with arc-welding gear, with hammers, drills, acid, electric shocks. Castration. Blinding. Dismemberment. These were the methods the FRU used to get at the truth.
No one but a lunatic would ever fuck with the FRU’s big cheese.
The blow back would be swift and terrible.
You’d have to be crazy.
I got to my feet. Matty stood next to me.
“Here, gents, take your poison,” Billy said offering us half a dozen cartons of cigarettes each.
I shook my head.
“Go on, lads, they’ve called a dock strike. Ciggies are all gonna be out of the shops by morning,” Billy said.
“Fuck it,” I said in a daze and took a carton of Marlboro. Matty took one of Benson and Hedges and we got a case of Virginia pipe tobacco for McCrabban. We walked out of the office into the wet battleship-grey Rathcoole afternoon. “Back in the Rover?” Matty asked.
“Let’s walk for a bit, clear our heads.”
We walked among the drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks. Everything was achromatic and in ruins less than twenty years after it had gone up. A massive social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. “Where do you think the women are, Matty?” I asked. “It’s all men, here. No women, no kids.”
“Inside washing the clothes, hitting the weans, cooking the chips.”
I stopped at a twenty-foot-tall graffito: Look Out, Look Out, The Rathcoole KAI’s About. “What does KAI stand for?”
“Kill All Irish.”
“Kill All Irish. Nice. Rathcoole is from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning ‘in the centre of the ring fort’. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.”
“If it was a palace these scumbags would still have messed it up, believe me,” Matty said.
I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock. Where had the day gone? “We should go home,” Matty said. “If Tommy Little was Force Research Unit, The Angel of Death wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole. This is obviously the wrong angle. These boys are not that stupid.”
“Aye, I know. All right. All right, we’ll get back in the Rover. We’ll head off, but I want you to drop me round the corner away from the prying eyes in the tower blocks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to go round the back of those derelict tenements and I’m going to sneak into one of them and wait for our boy to come out.”
“Billy?”
“I’m going to wait for Billy’s wee friend, Shane. I think he knows something he’s not saying.”
“Everybody in Belfast knows something they’re not saying.”
We got in the Land Rover. Matty drove me to a doomed basketball court that was now a rubbish dump filled with skips, shopping trolleys, prams and the odd burnt-out, hijacked car. I got out of the passenger side and put my gun in my raincoat pocket. “You be careful, Sean, ok?” Matty said.
“Careful is my middle name. That and Aloysius but you don’t need to tell anybody that.”
He smiled and I walked through the swirling circles of
garbage to the abandoned terrace.
13: HE KISSED ME AND IT FELT LIKE A HIT
I waited in a gutted living room among the rats and human excrement, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeons. Outside the rain was pouring so hard it was as if hate rather than gravity was sucking it down to Rathcoole.
I had a perfect view of the snooker hall and the sad little strip mall. Only the bookie was doing any business but that wasn’t surprising with the Derby coming up and the beautiful bay stallion Shergar, even at 1–6, a horse to bet your pension on.
Evening.
The scene at the snooker hall began to wind down and Billy drove off in his Merc at seven on the zero zero. Shane came out at 7.01 with a leather jacket over his head in lieu of a raincoat. I turned up the collar on my mac and followed him at a discreet distance, into the estate, along the Doagh Road, through Abbots Cross (the very place where Bobby Sands had been born) past Whiteabbey Hospital and down the Station Road.
He stopped at the station bar for a drink. I followed him inside and got a whiskey against the cold. The local news was on. The murder of Tommy Little and Andrew Young was now the sixth lead. No one was interested. I wondered if that would piss off our killer. Perhaps he’d go bigger or perhaps he’d take his game over the water where it would play better. The story ran for less than a minute and that included another incendiary remark from Councillor George Seawright who said that homo-sexuals should be shipped to an island in the Atlantic and left to starve to death.
Shane finished his drink, bought a book of matches and left by the side door.
I waited ten beats and went out after him.
Several times Shane looked back to see if he was being tailed, but he never checked the far side of the street, two hundred yards behind. There were many ways to shake a tail and he knew none of them. “Who do you think’s after you, Shane, my lad? Or is just the dark you’re afeared of?”
He turned left on the Shore Road and walked a good quarter of a mile to Loughshore Park, a pleasant little bit of greenery right on the water. We were nearly at the University of Ulster now but instead of doing the obvious and turning up the Jordanstown Road or going straight on, he cut across the busy Shore Road and went to the public toilets at the park.
I waited for him to come back out.
He didn’t come back out.
The wind was whipping up the boats in the lough and forcing spray onto the highway. It was freezing and the rain was running down the back of my neck.
I saw that there was an exit to the toilets on the park side so I crossed over the Shore Road and waited under the branches of a small confederacy of white oak trees.
At least with the rain there will be no rioting tonight, I said to myself. And I’ll bet that the power workers’ wives forced their hubbies to keep the light and heat on too. The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.
I stood there for a good fifteen minutes. “Has he fallen down the bloody hole?” I muttered. And then I began to have a darker suspicion.
We were on the trail of a killer after all …
I took the service revolver out of my raincoat pocket and checked there were six.38 rounds in the cylinder. I stepped out from under the branches and began walking towards the bogs.
I got half way there and saw someone leave the toilets from the Shore Road side and walk briskly to a parked car I hadn’t noticed before. A Volkswagen Beetle. I began to run, but he began running too to get out of the rain.
He got in the Beetle and it drove off in the direction of the M5 motorway and the sliproads for Belfast.
“Jesus! You bloody blew it, Duffy!” I cursed myself. You wanted to be dry so you stood under the trees rather than a place where you would be equidistant between both exits. “You bloody idiot!” I said to the rain and the crashing surf.
Didn’t even get a licence plate, although if it was Shane and Shane’s car it would be easy enough to check.
“All right, all right, let’s see what you were doing in the bog for the last twenty five minutes,” I said, keeping my gun ahead of me as I went inside.
For some reason I’d been expecting a junkie but of course it was a fruit instead.
He was about nineteen or twenty, blue eyes, pale skin, black hair in a sort of Elvis quiff. High cheekbones and his fingernails were lacquered red. He was far too attractive not to be a poofter and he was wearing a leather jacket, jeans and converse high tops — standard rentboy garb.
He looked at the.38 and I put it away.
“Ahh, you’re a policeman,” he said nonchalantly.
“Well, I ain’t your fairy godmother.”
He took a step towards me. “Look at you, coming on so tough,” he said.
“Aren’t you the brave lad? What’s your name, son?”
“John Smith. You can call me Johnnie.”
He didn’t seem at all concerned that I could possibly shoot him or kneecap him. This toilet must be a well-known queer hang-out. I checked the graffiti on the wall: the usual Fuck The Pope, Remember 1690, UVF, UDA, UFF, but not as much of it as you would expect so close to Rathcoole.
“Who was that that was just in here?” I asked.
“His name?”
“Aye, his name.”
“I’ve seen him around, peeler, but I don’t know his name. Not really my type.”
“What was he doing in here?”
The kid smiled. “You know what he was doing.”
“Don’t play games with me, pal, I’ll fucking slap you round the head.”
“Is that how you get your kicks?”
“All right, sunshine, enough of the smart remarks. Spread ’em up against the wall,” I said.
“That’s not the first time I’ve heard that tonight.”
I pushed his face against the tiles, patted him down and searched him. He had about 100 quid in one of his jacket pockets, a tiny bag of cannabis resin wrapped in cling film in the other. Not enough to get him on a distribution wrap and certainly not worth the hassle of the paperwork.
“Where did you get this?” I asked him.
He didn’t reply. I pulled out the.38 again and shoved the barrel against his cheek. “Where did you get it?”
“From him,” he said. “The one you were talking about.”
I nodded and put the cannabis in my raincoat pocket.
“What did he want from you?” I asked.
The kid turned round and stared at me.
A long searching look. Even in the darkness his eyes were very blue. He took a step closer and moved the revolver with a finger so that it was no longer pointing at him.
“The same thing you want,” he said.
He slipped a hand behind my neck, pushed me forward and kissed me on the lips. I pulled back, startled, horrified. He kept the pressure on the back of my head and kissed me again, gently at first and then deep, letting his fingers caress my scalp.
“What the hell are you doing?” I hissed.
“If you want to go, you should go now, copper,” he said.
Of course I wanted to go. But I stayed where I was.
He ran his hands under my shirt and over my back.
He looks like a girl was what I told myself. Except that he didn’t, not at all.
He explored my mouth with his tongue.
I was confused, guilty, hungry for more.
“I’m not a fairy,” I said.
“Shut up and enjoy yourself,” he said.
I ran my hand down his spine. I cupped his tight, girlish arse.
I closed my eyes.
Let him kiss me.
Relaxed.
We caught our breaths for a moment.
“Well?” he said and leaned his head against my forehead and grinned.
“This will be something new for my next confessional,” I said.
He laughed. “A Catholic boy! How charming.”
“I … I better go,” I muttered.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe next time then.”
“Maybe.”
I walked the seven miles back to Carrick along the Shore Road.
It was lashing. I tried to hail a taxi but none of them stopped and every single phone along the route had been vandalized.
I went into the Dobbins and got a pint of Guinness and sat steaming by the fire. I was the only customer. I stared at the flames and the black hearth and the peat logs turning grey and then white.
All the newsagents were closed so I asked Derek behind the bar to sell me some cigarette paper, matches and loose leaf tobacco. I walked to Carrickfergus Castle and found the smugglers steps down to the black lough water. Sheltered by the big eight-hundred-year-old outer castle wall, I took the cigarette paper and crumbled in the tobacco. I removed the cannabis resin from the cellophane, cooked it in the flame of a match and crumbled half of the wad between my thumb and forefinger on top of the tobacco. I stirred it together with my finger and rolled it up.
I lit the end of the spliff and sat there watching the lough traffic and the occasional army helicopter zipping from crisis to crisis. The cannabis was hardcore skunk and I was toasted when I walked across the harbour car park and over the Marine Highway to Laura’s apartment.
I knocked on the door. And knocked and knocked.
It had started to storm now and lightning was hitting the conductors on the County Down side of the lough. The rain was cold and horizontal.
She opened the door.
She was wearing an Oriental bathrobe and had a towel wrapped around her wet hair in that mysterious way only women can do.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“I don’t know … What does anybody want? Heidegger said death is the central fact of life after being. We can’t experience our own death but we can fear it.”
She was shook her head. “No, Sean, what do you want with me? What are you doing here?”
A loose strand of wet hair unhooked itself from the towel. She looked beautiful like this. “The movies,” I said. “The one about the chariot race. Let’s go before they firebomb the cinema.”
She folded her arms across her chest and sniffed.
“I got your flowers,” she said.
“Can I come in?” I asked.
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