Twisted Agendas

by Damian McNicholl

  “Who do you think… ”

  “I didn’t want it this way.” Her father pointed the revolver at her mother. “Not in front of our daughter.”

  “Dad!” Piper moved toward him but he stepped back. “What are you doing?”

  Everything was surreal. She saw the gun but couldn’t believe it was there. She blinked slowly. It was still there, still in her father’s shaking hand, still pointed at her mother’s chest.

  “Dad, you’re the cop.”

  “Kevin, think of your daughter,” her mother said, her voice unsteady now.

  “You’ve ruined my life, Philomena. There’s nothing left.”

  She’d never seen her father’s eyes so dead. Their dark blue cores were black and had no light.

  “Kevin… listen to me.” Her mother swallowed hard. “Think before you pull… ”

  “‘For better, for worse. Till death do us part.’ Remember that promise?”

  Everything unfurled in slow motion as her father’s hand began to move. The revolver turned inward and then its muzzle was pressed against his right temple. A surge of raw energy passed through Piper’s body. His finger flexed. For an instant she was at once captivated and horrified.

  “NO. Dad, no. What Mom’s done to you is wrong. She’s treated you badly. But why kill yourself because of her?” Piper’s mind whipped through other convincing things to say. She could not fail. “It’s a sin what you’re gonna do. A big sin. There’s no grey here.” The revolver stayed pointed. “Dad, I won’t change my name when I marry. I’ll do that for you. I promise. I need you. But you have to promise you’ll stay for me. That’s what I need. Rory’s watching, Dad. He wouldn’t want this.”

  His hand began to shake. Piper moved toward him slowly. Reaching up, she gripped the icy snout of the gun. His grip slackened. He released it and began to sob. Huge, strangled sobs. She tossed the gun onto the grass and embraced him tightly.

  “Mom, go now.”

  Her mother’s stricken expression looked pathetic. Piper was glad when she turned away. When she reached the path, her mother stopped and looked back.

  Piper stroked the back of her father’s head. “Not a word to anyone about this, Mom.”

  A very long day

  At first he thought he’d awoken from a nightmare. The knocking continued. Still groggy, he wondered if it was Julia and she’d forgotten her keys. Danny slipped on his dressing gown and went downstairs.

  When he opened the door, six men forced their way inside, two with handguns drawn.

  “Special Branch,” one of the men brandishing a gun said. He held up a Metropolitan police badge. “What’s your name?”

  Blood rushed from Danny’s head. He felt very lightheaded but managed to raise his hands.

  “What’s your name?” The man had close-set, steely eyes and a Roman nose that was off kilter.

  “Danny Connolly.”

  “Anyone else here?”

  Danny shook his head as the second detective and a colleague went upstairs. Their footsteps so heavy he thought the staircase would collapse. The others began ransacking the living room, pulling books from the bookcase and searching drawers. Cutlery dropped on the kitchen’s tiled floor. Upstairs, heavy furniture shrieked and the ceiling shook. A toilet was flushed, followed immediately by the sound of glass shattering.

  An officer with a snow-white scar on his chin tumbled the fichus plant by the French doors. He rolled it with his foot and went outside. Another detective followed him. Policemen shouted from every corner. Minutes later, the officer with the scar came running in from the garden.

  “We’ve found it.”

  “Found what?” Danny asked.

  “We’re detaining you under Section 41 of the Terrorism Act,” said the detective with the gun who’d been guarding him. “Hands behind your back.”

  “I’m not a bloody terrorist,” Danny said. “What am I accused of doing?”

  The detective ordered his colleague to handcuff him, then said, “You don’t have to say anything, but it can harm your defense if you do not mention when asked something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.”

  “Let’s go,” the detective said.

  Danny remembered what Piper had once told him. “I’m not going anywhere till I’ve showered and am properly dressed. It’s my legal right.”

  The muscles in the detective’s face twitched. “Uncuff ’im,” he said. “You’ve got two minutes.”

  He escorted Danny to his bedroom where he discovered the carpeting had been ripped up in two corners. The wardrobe and chest of drawers had been pulled away from the wall. The contents of the bin were dumped on top of the chest of drawers, beside his German dictionary and textbooks. Crumpled pages of sentences he’d composed and tossed into the basket two days prior lay smoothed out on the disheveled bed.

  As he made his way to the bathroom, a detective was searching in the tiny spare room. Another was in Julia’s room. A lime-caked rinsing glass lay broken inside the sink, together with his and Julia’s tubes of toothpaste and brushes. The hot water was running. He closed the bathroom door, but privacy was obviously not a legal right because the detective pushed it open. Danny lathered his face and began to slowly shave.

  “You haven’t got all fucking day.”

  Danny didn’t reply. He opened the shower door and turned on the tap to allow the water to run until it became hot, then returned to the sink and resumed shaving.

  As he showered, the detective continued to demand he hurry. Danny didn’t change his pace, though also knew he had to be very precise about his acts of passive aggression. His secret insubordination imparted a sense of tiny control in the massively uncontrollable situation. That Piper had survived a similar invasion also calmed him. When he was finished shaving, he climbed into the shower and slung the bath towel over the clear glass door so it acted as a curtain. Senses extremely alert, he noticed things he hadn’t before: how slick his skin became when he ran his fingers over his soaped arms and chest as if it was actually melting beneath his fingers; that fragrance-free soap actually had a smell.

  “Nothing up here,” said a detective. He peered from the loft as Danny was escorted along the landing back to his bedroom.

  “Go downstairs and help Mike finish out back, then.”

  As he put on his shirt he looked out his bedroom window and saw the detective with the scar searching within the rosebushes at the back of the garden. Danny’s fingers, plump and wrinkled by the hot water, felt clumsy. He struggled to push the buttons of the shirt through the eyeholes.

  “Stop gawking and get a move on,” said the detective.

  Ten minutes later, after dressing in a pair of chinos and putting on a silk tie, he was ordered downstairs where he walked over to the phone on the dining room table.

  “That’s not on,” said the detective.

  “It’s my right to make a call.”

  “Not under the Terrorism Act, it’s not. We decide when and who you ring. Put your hands behind your back.”

  Danny didn’t argue. A car was parked in the middle of the street outside his door with its engine already running. Mrs. Hartley’s light was on and her front door ajar, but he couldn’t see her. Two men on their way to work stopped to watch. Sonia Berg was unlocking her car door further along the street.

  “Sonia,” he called.

  She turned around.

  “I’ve been arrested. Tell Julia.”

  Gripping the back of Danny’s neck, the detective pushed down his head and forced him inside the vehicle. The others climbed inside. Squashed tightly inside the vehicle, Danny’s arms and legs pressed against his incarcerators’ limbs. He hated the feeling. He could also hardly breathe. The serrated edge of the handcuffs bit into his wrists. Before the back door was properly shut, the driver sped away.

  As no uniformed police officers were present, he assumed the building was some kind of special detention centre used by the Special Branch. Upon arrival, the
y’d confiscated his watch, credit card, mobile phone and cash and stuffed them into a clear plastic bag before escorting him to a room where a female officer brusquely informed him she needed to take his fingerprints. When he demanded to see a lawyer, she added the police had the right to prevent him from access for forty-eight hours (longer if they decided to get a court order) and the prints could be taken by force if he didn’t cooperate. The woman’s cold professionalism as she pressed his fingers one by one into the film of black ink and then turned them left to right on the glass surface of a scanner device heightened Danny’s humiliation. Something essential, something intimate, was being stolen from him and put into a database without his consent.

  He was now sitting on a flimsy chair inside a small window-less cell that’s walls and ceiling were a dingy off-white colour, the sort of colour brilliant white became after years of exposure to cigarette tar. Across from him a three-foot wide ledge contained a shallow flimsy mattress, drab blue and white striped pillow and thin dirty blanket that smelled of old sweat. A toilet missing its plastic seat and adjacent washbasin with a large rust mark running from the faucet to the drain was attached to the wall on his right.

  The lack of sound was unsettling, which hadn’t bothered him at first. He couldn’t even hear the drone of the buses or taxis he knew were passing by on the street, or the detectives’ footsteps as they came to spy on him through the peephole in the metal door. For a third time in the four or so hours he figured he’d now been in their custody, a knife of panic pierced his chest at the realisation he was cut off from the world. He was at the mercy of the shadowy secret police. He’d watched movies and read newspaper articles about people harassed and injured while in police custody. They could even make him disappear permanently if they wanted. His chest broke out in a cold sweat. He began to pace the cell. A minute later, he went to the door and put his palms and forehead against it, instantly feeling the coldness of the unyielding steel despite its layers of thick paint.

  How could the authorities have made such a terrible mistake? Surely they’d done their homework and discovered he was a university graduate, that he was law-abiding and never been actively involved in politics or the Troubles; that he shared a house with a respectable immigration officer, someone as crucial as them within the British law enforcement machine. He wondered what they’d found in the garden. Had they planted something sinister to frame him? Danny banged the door with his fist four times. He put his ear to it and listened. Not a sound. He banged again, harder this time until his fist hurt. The noise felt good. He listened again. Nothing. He began to pace.

  The hours passed by and he had no idea now whether it was day or night. No-one came with food or water. He was parched. Though repulsed, he turned on the tap, put his mouth near it and drank. The water was overly chlorinated, tepid and foul. He lay on the bed, supine, not permitting any part of his face to make contact with the disgusting pillow. As he stared alternately at the walls and naked overhead light, he imagined Julia calling police stations all over London looking for him. He thought about his parents and his former life in Northern Ireland, how he’d never truly been inconvenienced by the conflict or endured intense bigotry like so many Catholics had in the towns and cities. All he’d had was a car search one night. No relatives of his had joined the IRA. No-one close to him had been a victim of the violence. He’d been oblivious and ignorant and this ignorance had caught up with him and he didn’t know what would be the result.

  To distract himself, he looked about the room and said aloud the German name for each object he could see. It took only a minute. He composed ever more complex German sentences. The grammar and word placement was wrong but he didn’t care. Despite his best efforts, his mind kept returning to his predicament and he’d panic and torment himself with a jumble of both sane and crazy doubts: whether his father had been right when he’d said he should never come to London; whether the police would unlock his cell door if a fire suddenly broke out in the building; whether they’d beat him up, or serve him with an exclusion order banning him from England if he was ever set free.

  The grinding of the metal door as it opened awoke him with a start. Danny stared up at the ceiling not knowing where he was until his brain snapped into gear and it all flooded back. He peered down the length of his body, saw he was covered by the thin, filthy blanket spotted with dried blood in places, but couldn’t remember pulling it up. A young, well-built detective with a pale English tan and strong jaw line entered carrying a tray.

  “Rise and shine,” he said. “Hope you like porridge.”

  His accent was Northern, from Manchester or Liverpool, Danny wasn’t certain.

  “What time is it?” Danny pulled the blanket down and swung his feet to the floor.

  “Not sure. I’ll find out for you.”

  He decided to take advantage of the stranger’s friendliness. “Where am I?”

  The officer set the tray on the bed beside him. “Eat up, mate.”

  Danny examined the tray’s contents, a bowl of lukewarm porridge with a film of bluish milk floating around the rim and centre, a mug of weak tea, two slices of pale toast scantily smeared with butter. He avoided the porridge fearing it was laced with some kind of truth drug. He’d read they did that. As he swigged the last of his tea, the door opened and another detective entered.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Danny stood and began to adjust his clothing.

  “Now,” said the detective.

  He was escorted down the corridor and entered a large room with metal filing cabinets lining its two walls. A dying spider plant on top of one cabinet reminded him of his mother’s plants and he wondered what she was doing at this very moment. Pinned on a cork notice board on the wall were Metropolitan Police mugshots of wanted terrorists and a child’s finger-painting of a bright sun and stickman and stickwoman holding hands. Detectives, including the brusque woman who’d taken his fingerprints, sat at fourteen desks running up both sides of the room. On the desktops were phones, computer monitors, keyboards and stacks of cream-coloured folders.

  Along the back wall were three doors. The detective gripped his upper arm, led him up to the middle door and pushed him into a small, brightly lit room containing a metal desk upon which was a tape recorder. Three chairs were positioned around the desk. He was ordered to sit and the detective left the room. Directly opposite from where he sat was a large oblong mirror. His hair looked unkempt and he began to smooth it until he remembered this was probably a one-way mirror and the police were observing him. He sat rigid with his eyes fixed on the door. Like back in his cell, he could hear no noise.

  Presently, the door opened and the fierce detective who’d read him his rights came in clutching a file. A second man followed him. Tall with a thick neck and wide shoulders, he looked familiar but Danny couldn’t place him. The detectives were immaculately dressed in pressed shirts and ties in contrast to Danny whose clothes were very wrinkled. He felt dirty inside and out.

  “Hello, Danny,” said the new detective. “I’m Detective Ian Tompkins and this is Detective Moore. We need to ask you some questions. Before we begin, do you need anything?”

  “A glass of water, please.”

  “Bill, fetch him water.”

  “He needs to answer a couple of questions to earn that privilege.”

  “Get the lad some water.”

  As Moore was leaving, Detective Tompkins took a cassette out of his shirt pocket and jammed it into the recorder. “Bill’s got a bit of a temper,” he said, and he switched on the machine. “Testing one, two, three.” He rewound the tape. “Don’t worry though. I’m here.”

  After the detective was satisfied the recorder was functioning, he leaned toward Danny. “Let’s get this over with as quickly as we can, eh? I’m going to ask you questions and, if you answer them truthfully, we’ll be done before you can say ‘Bob’s your Uncle.’” Long front teeth and incisors appeared when he smiled. “That sound fair, lad?”

&n
bsp; “Yes.”

  “What say we begin before Bill gets back?”

  “Fine.”

  After he switched on the tape recorder, he gave Danny the same caution Moore had given him the previous day.

  “What’s your full name?”

  “Danny Francis Connolly.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “42 Chumley Street, W6.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  A barrage of questions about his family and upbringing in Northern Ireland ensued, which Danny answered without hesitation. After twenty minutes, Danny asked about the whereabouts of the water and the detective explained his colleague had probably got waylaid but was sure he’d return shortly with it. The recorder switched off and the detective inserted the other side.

  “When did you come to London?” he asked.

  “In May.”

  “Why?”

  After he explained, the detective opened the file, read for a minute and then stared at Danny. “What part did you play in the bombing on Hammersmith Bridge?”

  A shock wave ripped through Danny’s chest. “I wasn’t involved in that.”

  “We agreed we’d get this business over with quickly, Danny. What part’d you play?”

  “I know nothing about a bomb.”

  It was suddenly surreal. The word ‘bomb’ had been used in conjunction with his name.

  “Where were you that night?” the detective asked.

  Danny thought for a moment. “I think I was home.” He pondered again. “Yes, I definitely was.”

  “Anyone with you?”

  “No.”

  “So no-one can vouch for your whereabouts?”

  Danny leaned slightly across the table toward him. “You must believe me. I had nothing to do with that bombing.”

  “So you’ve had something to do with a bombing, then? Which one?”

  “I haven’t bombed anything.”

  “An innocent man was murdered on the bridge by the IRA,” Detective Tompkins said. “He’d just got engaged three weeks before.”