‘I bet they will, Charlie. One squeak and it’s a bullet in the kneecaps, one squawk and it’s a bullet in the head,’ I said.
‘I’ll remember you said that, that’s defamation!’ McGuirk said, and had the temerity to write my name down in his book.
We left CI Farrow to it. Her pale, young face, lined and old from ten years of constant defeats. Defeats like this. Because nobody talked. Nobody ever talked.
BMW back to Carrick RUC.
‘What do you think, boss?’ Crabbie asked in the front passenger seat.
‘Her informer better be bloody good. He better be well protected. He better be sturdy as fuck and in a safe house far, far away,’ I said.
Crabbie nodded.
‘They’re going to release Jones without charge, aren’t they?’ Lawson said.
‘Yes,’ Crabbie and I said together.
BMW back to Coronation Road.
A bottle of Lagavulin on my doorstep, with a ribbon around it. A more suspicious man would have left it there, or poured it out, but I brought it in. Doubtless it was for services rendered at some point. A domestic-violence dispute I’d sorted out, or a word in the shell-like of some teen vandal.
I poured a measure of Lagavulin, but I was too keyed-up to appreciate it. This case was coming to a head. They might not be able to pin anything on Mr Jones, but tomorrow night I’d make Tony tell me everything he knew. He would not be able to lie to me, not when I told him everything I knew.
Phone call.
‘Yeah?’
‘Is this Duffy?’
‘Who’s asking?’
‘This is Chief Inspector Kennedy from Larne RUC. You’ve been noseying around our files and I don’t like it.’
‘Yeah you won’t like it either when I take a monster shite in that fucking cake-hole of yours, which I will if you ever call me at home again. Then again, you’d probably fucking love it, wouldn’t ya, you coprophiliac cunt. Look it up. Furthermore, if you ever embarrass me in front of my gaffer again, you’ll end up like your beloved Führer, with a poisoned dog, a Red Army bulldozer through your fucking conservatory, and you lying in a ditch covered in petrol, begging me not to light the fucking match. Ya get me?’ I said and slammed the phone down.
It rang again, five minutes later.
‘What now, fuck-face?’ I asked.
‘Sir, it’s me, Lawson,’ he said, sounding hurt.
‘Oh, sorry, Lawson. A thousand apologies. I thought you were someone else.’
‘Do you like twists, sir?’
‘You know I don’t like twists, Lawson. What’s happened?’
‘Mr Underhill. The DPP’s investigative team just sent us a fax.’
‘Oh bugger. What did we miss?’
‘The DPP uncovered an incident he was involved in, in 1962. He was a “person of interest” in the case of a young nurse who broke her neck falling over the banister and down the stairs of a guest-house they were both staying at in Glasgow. The Glasgow peelers questioned Underhill and a few of the other residents, but no case ever came to trial, so it’s not in our records.’
I groaned into the phone.
‘The DPP want us to look into it.’
‘Of course they do.’
‘If he did it before, it sort of sets a pattern, doesn’t it?’
‘The previous incident can’t be used as evidence in the current case.’
‘It can’t?’
‘No, Lawson, it can’t, the defence barrister will say that its prejudicial effect outweighs its probative value. It won’t be covered by the exception in Rex v Smith (1915) the famous brides-in-the-bath case, of which I’m sure you’re aware …’
‘Uhm …’
‘But we’ll have to ask him about it. We’ll interview him again tomorrow morning.’
‘Won’t we have to notify his solicitor? That woman from the navy?’
‘Not if we don’t arrest him. Tell Crabbie. See you in the morning.’
More Lagavulin. The news on mute. I tried to make sense of things through a haze of booze and images. Blah, blah, fucking blah.
I finished the bottle and went up the stairs, steadying myself on the hand rail. I paused at the photograph of me and Muhammad Ali. Me and the Champ. ‘Me and the Champ, Beth,’ I muttered. ‘“A twist”, he says. I’ll twist him.’
I flopped on to the bed.
I dreamed Rumble in the Jungle.
I dreamed Thrilla in Manilla.
And I dreamed of the big fight to come tomorrow.
23: THE FAMOUS CARRICKFERGUS FIFTEEN-PUB CRAWL
Rain. The echoing boom of gun fire. A phone dangling on its wire in a phone box in West Street, Carrickfergus. Where the Dream Lines crossed. Where I was making the Deep Map. Where one part of this story ended. ‘Ambulance! Ambulance!’ I’m screaming into the phone, trying to make myself heard over the rain … Yeah, I know what you’re thinking: gun battle, rain, Ireland. But you don’t know. You have no idea. You weren’t there. For you the eighties are: Thatcher triumphant, the Argies bashed, North Sea oil, the unions broke, the Reagan–Thatcher two-step. For you, but not for us. For us it’s helicopters, low clouds, soldiers, curling umbilicals of ash over the great, grey, dying city …
I wish we could spin the clock back to the beginning of the day. Freeze Duffy there, as he drives to Carrick Castle. Let him avoid the melodrama. Let him lose the girl and get the girl and go to Liverpool and grow up and become a man. Let his story be the parsing of the human condition. But, alas, we can’t do that, because we’re dealing with truth here. Ugly, vulgar, violent, clumsy truth …
Carrickfergus Police Station.
I’d been a few days off. In theory, I didn’t have to show up for work at all because someone had tried to kill me with a bomb under my car. If this was any other police force in the world you’d be in counselling for months after something like that. But RUC men and women were made of sterner stuff. Here, this was par for the course and when I came in, it was a few handshakes, a few ‘it’s good to see you still in one piece’s and that was it. Sergeant Dalziel with his frizzy hair and yellow raincoat came in to give me admin grief and I hit him with a few ‘where’s your mate Keith Harris?’ lines but it was half hearted from both of us and he left.
Crabbie and Lawson arrived at nine.
‘Shall we go and see Mr Underhill?’ Crabbie asked.
‘We shall.’
Walk to the castle. Up the castle ramp and under the portcullis to the ticket booth.
‘Not you lot again! I’m calling my lawyers!’ Underhill said, indignantly.
‘Steady on, Mr Underhill, we just want to ask you one more thing. Give us five minutes of your time.’
‘What do you want to ask me about?’
‘Mary O’Connor. May, 1962. The Fairview Bed and Breakfast on Dumbarton Road, Glasgow. She fell from the third floor and broke her neck. You lived on the same landing as her.’
Underhill looked as if he’d been pole-axed.
He sighed and shook his head with infinite sadness.
‘Aye, I killed her,’ he said.
‘You killed her?’
‘Aye, now that I reflect upon it. I as good as killed her.’
‘Why don’t you tell us what happened?’
‘I gave her to understand that we were to be married. And then one day she found letters from my wife in Plymouth. I didnae have the chance to explain that we’d been living apart for years. I didnae know if it was an accident, or whether she went deliberately over the rail of the staircase. I like to think it was an accident. My sea chest was open and the letters were on my bed. Maybe she ran out of the room and she slipped … Aye, I like to think that. I don’t like to think that she read the letters and walked to the rail and climbed over …’
We spent the rest of the melancholy afternoon checking Underhill’s story.
He was the first to find the body but he arrived back at the guest-house with a friend whom he had met at Glasgow Central railway station.
The
alibi checked out.
The story checked out.
Not R v Smith. Not the brides-in-the-bath case. Just one of those awful things that happen …
I was still in a melancholy mood when I shook Tony’s hand in the saloon bar of the Tourist Inn in Eden at 6 pm.
‘What about you Sean? We haven’t done this in years.’
‘We’re getting too old for this. In fact, I was thinking, what if we got a half a pint in every pub instead of a pint? Fifteen pints is going to kill us at our age.’
‘A half a pint? I can’t go up and order a half a pint. I’ll look ridiculous. Half a pint. Who orders half a pint?’
‘All right, a pint it is, then. I’ll blame you if we get alcohol poisoning.’
‘Sounds like a plan,’ Tony said. ‘I’ll get the first one in? Bass?’
‘Aye.’
And so began the first of the fifteen pubs in the famous fifteenpub crawl that took you through every bar in Carrickfergus.
From north to south, roughly along the Belfast Road, the fifteen pubs and clubs where you could get a pint in Carrick were: the Tourist Inn, the Royal Oak, Ownies, Dobbins, the Central Bar, the Mermaid Tavern, the Dolphin, the Buffs Club, the Wind Rose, the Borough Arms, the North Gate, the Railway Tavern, the Rangers Club, the Rugby Club, the Brown Cow Inn …
Technically, there was also the Golf Club and the Yacht Club, but they were off the traditional route and you had to be a member to get served, so fuck them.
The Tourist Inn was a sad venue to begin the crawl. A dreary place with watered-down beer and a reek from the toilets that lingered in the saloon bar. It was the local for only the most desperate of alcoholics and we quickly finished our pints and headed down to the Royal Oak.
Here we had two choices: the downstairs bar which was full of cops and an older crowd and was quiet or the upstairs bar where they played horrible loud music, only served awful lager, but which was full of jail bait and divorcees.
‘Upstairs then?’ I said.
‘Aye,’ Tony agreed.
We went upstairs and sure enough it was full of 17-year-olds drinking cider and rather attractive 30- and 40-year-olds knocking back gin and tonics. The music on the video screens was Prince or George Michael at eardrum-smashing levels.
I talked to Tony about his marriage and living in England and his father-in-law who was an MP. He told me everything. Tony liked to talk. He was one of those chatty Prods.
‘I was just thinking that you’re one of those chatty Prods. Not like McCrabban and those boys,’ I said, sipping my pint of Harp.
‘That lot are all Presbyterian and Free Presbyterian. I’m a Methodist,’ Tony explained.
‘And what do you lot believe, then?’
‘You know … God, Jesus, the works. No pope, though.’
‘Saints? All that stuff?’
‘I don’t think so,’ Tony said vaguely.
‘I haven’t been to mass in years. Or confession. I’ll be fucked if I get run over by a bus tonight.’
‘Jesus, it’s hot in here,’ Tony said, taking off his leather jacket. He was wearing a blue stripy shirt underneath, white denim jeans and sneakers. He was trying to look younger than he was and he did look younger. He could have passed for thirty.
‘Loo,’ he said.
When he was safely in the bathroom I quickly looked in the side pockets of the leather jacket for a gun and didn’t find one. As an ex-policeman he’d have to apply for a licence. Sometimes they gave you one. Sometimes they didn’t. I, of course, was carrying mine. I was wearing blue jeans, DMs and my trusty good-luck Che T-shirt – no jacket, but deep in my raincoat pocket I was carrying my Glock 15 and a set of handcuffs.
As an RUC detective you had a choice of firearms: either an ancient Walther PPK .32-calibre semi-automatic, or an even more ancient revolver. Fortunately, I’d been in Special Branch for a brief tenure and gotten my hands on a Glock. The upshot of all this was that I was armed and Tony wasn’t and I’d brought my handcuffs along, too, to make him come quietly.
‘What are you thinking about?’ he said, approaching from behind and slapping me on the back.
‘Oh, you know, Beth …’
‘Beth?’
‘You didn’t meet her. Student. Nice. Funny, you would have liked her.’
‘Student. Sounds like a pain in the arse.’
‘She wasn’t.’
I finished my pint. ‘Do you want to get another round in, or will we head on?’
‘You’re going to the loo with your raincoat on? Everybody’s looking at you. Leave your coat, for fucksake, mate.’
‘My gun’s in it.’
‘I’ll watch it. No one’ll steal it.’
I took the coat off and left it on my stool.
‘What about you, Tony? Are you carrying?’
‘Of course I bloody am! In this country?’
‘You’ve got a gun?’ I asked, surprised.
‘Had this made special. Look at this,’ he said, showing me the secret pocket he’d had tailored in the inside left-hand side of the jacket. Shit. Missed that. Good job I asked.
‘Whatcha carrying?’
‘.45 ACP. Oldie but goodie. Hollow point. One of those’ll stop a fucking rhino.’
‘Legal?’
Tony winked at me. ‘Thought you had to go to the loo, mate?’
When I got back I noticed that the coat had been moved slightly, but when I reached inside the pocket to check, the gun and cuffs were still there.
More videos, more lager, more loud, terrible music.
‘Look at that bint over there, she’s giving me the eye.’
‘Sure she is … all right, Tony, time to go to Ownies now, I think,’ I said.
Outside into the cool air. Rain clouds dropping a fine drizzle onto us as we walked down the Scotch Quarter.
Ownies was a different story altogether. Old men in flat caps playing dominoes. No music, roaring fire, good beer.
‘Pint of Guinness?’ I asked Tony.
‘Yeah. Missed a decent pint when I was over the sheugh.’
I got Tony a Guinness and a lager for myself.
‘Another trip to the loo,’ I said and took my pint with me. I poured three-quarters of it out and filled it up with water.
‘So, London, eh? The Met? Must have been great,’ I said, coming back to the table.
Tony sighed. ‘I was quids in mate, quids in. I blew it over there. A woman will tolerate weakness in a man, but she will not tolerate repeated humiliation. Neither will her father, apparently …’
I let him spill it. It was interesting from a psychological standpoint. How the clever, ambitious but honest Tony of five years ago had become this man I saw before me now.
This … well, there was no other word for it.
This murderer.
If all my assumptions were correct.
‘What about you, Sean Duffy? What’s cooking in that big brain of yours?’ he said, tapping my head. ‘You always were the nowhere man, the cypher on the outside looking in. You could be thinking anything.’
‘So could you, Tony.’
‘No, not me. No back doors to Tony McIlroy. What you see is what you get. But you … You’re a deep old cat. Always were. Jesus, this is a good pint.’
We finished up and went outside into the increasingly stormy night.
‘Did you check the weather forecast?’ Tony asked.
‘No. Did you?’
‘It’s a fucking tempest, mate.’
‘Aye, it’s not looking too good. Where to?’
‘Central Bar.’
Central Bar, Mermaid, Dolphin, Wind Rose, Buffs Club.
A couple of half pints and me watering down my pints on my shout, but Tony holding up his end surprisingly well. He’d always been a heroic drinker. Heroic drinker, heroic fighter, good mate. And I remembered the time he’d decked a guy for calling me a fenian bastard in Newry RUC.
Tony wasn’t into music, so we talked football and women. Women and football. He
said he still liked the Arsenal and he wasn’t banging either his secretary or receptionist.
‘I’m a changed man, Sean. None of that any more.’
‘How is the business doing?’
‘Not too bad, actually. Things were touch and go at first, but not too bad now. People don’t go to Securicor for finesse work.’
We finished our pints in the Buffs and walked up North Street to the Borough Arms, North Gate and the Railway Tavern. The latter three all paramilitary bars. One UDA, two UVF. Not exactly welcoming places for a cop and an ex-cop. How they could tell we were peelers I had no idea but they could tell. We went to the toilet together, lest we get a beer keg in the head.
The rain was apocalyptic outside now and everyone was going home early, before the Marine Highway started to flood.
‘You know, mate, I don’t think we’re going to make the fifteen. I think we should go back down to the Dobbins and end it there,’ I said as I pissed into the back yard of the Railway Tavern – the only toilet facilities they had.
Tony was outraged. ‘Not make the fifteen? The whole point of this was to do the fifteen pubs!’
‘You fancy hiking up the Woodburn Road all the way to the Rugby Club and the Brown Cow in this?’
Tony looked at me and grinned.
‘We gave it a good shot, though, eh? For old-timers. Didn’t we? We gave it a run for our money.’
Down to the Dobbins Inn in the pouring rain.
We were the only customers in Dobbins, so we got the huge sixteenth-century fireplace to ourselves. It had been stacked with turf that had turned to ash and was giving off a tremendous heat. Steam lifted from my raincoat, my trousers and even from my shoes.
‘You’re wetter than the time you fell in the Bann!’ Tony laughed. ‘You remember that time?’
‘I remember. And you did nothing to fish me out!’
‘Happy days, Sean. Happy days. When we were young and innocent. Another shout?’
‘Why not?’
I looked at my watch. It was 11 pm. Tony wasn’t as drunk as I’d hoped he would be and it was last orders now.
Tony came back with two pints of Bass and a packet of fags. Embassy. I lit one anyway and stubbed it out after one puff. Vile.
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