by Chris Petit
When the Range Rover pulled up outside the Duke of York the soldier in the passenger seat of the Triumph used the two-way radio to report to base and lit a cigarette to irritate the driver, who lowered his window. Unpleasant gusts of cold air blew into the overheated interior.
They made desultory conversation but the driver was not a talkative man. The forecourt stayed empty, apart from the occasional scurrying figure, hunched against the rain. The driver looked at his watch and sighed. ‘Last fucking orders, please.’ His colleague lit another cigarette and amused himself with the night glasses. A couple tottered drunkenly out of the pub.
‘What’s so funny?’ the bored driver asked when the other man started to smirk.
‘Bloke having a slash. You can see the steam.’
The humourless driver grunted. ‘Fucking animals.’
He took the glasses and a little later spotted a figure crouched down by the door of the Range Rover. He watched, puzzled, then reached for the radio and spoke in the pedantic manner of those whose limited powers of observation have been drummed into them by rote.
‘Delta four zero to honeypot. Come in, honeypot. We are in our last reported position. We have what looks like a stoley. The white Range Rover under obs is being broken into. Two persons involved. Weather does not permit full description, but both are wearing dark clothes. Do we follow or not, bearing in mind our orders to stay with the Range Rover? Over.’
The last remark set his colleague off laughing. ‘Rover over.’
A crackly voice came back, telling them to stay where they were.
‘Understood,’ said the driver. ‘Vehicle departed, heading north.’
The other man was becoming helpless with laughter.
‘I can’t wait to see our boys’ faces when they find their motor missing.’
The Range Rover avoided the known roadblocks in the area and it was not until fifteen minutes later that a police patrol car spotted it in the vicinity of Ormeau Road. It skirted the west bank of the Lagan before heading north, then east towards a hastily organised trap of two army jeeps and a police car, an unmarked Ford Granada recognizable only by the way it sat so low on the road because of its reinforced armour plating.
The police car was the first to give chase, tucking in behind the stolen car before announcing itself by switching its lights to full beam. The two vehicles wove expertly in and out of the night traffic, and jumped a set of red lights at sixty, causing two intersecting cars to collide.
The police Granada lost the Range Rover in a housing estate and positioned the two army jeeps by the main exits to the estate while it attempted to flush out the stolen vehicle. In spite of an epidemic of joyriding in the city, the driver of the police car had never been involved in a chase before and was nervous.
One of the jeeps spotted the stolen vehicle leaving the estate and set off in pursuit, alerting the second army vehicle which took up a ramming position but mistimed its run and narrowly avoided colliding with the first jeep. The two jeeps were still immobile when the Range Rover shot past in the opposite direction after doing a handbrake turn that had spun it around a hundred and eighty degrees.
News of the chase brought clusters of people on to the street, youths mostly, who applauded the getaway car.
‘Sticking out!’ yelled a lad, chucking a rock at the army cars as they pulled away. It bounced off the side of the vehicle with a dull thud. A cheer went up.
The police car was a quarter of a mile away when told that the Range Rover was heading its way. By then the two policemen had started to enjoy themselves. It made a change from their normal patrol routine of betting on distances and checking them against the milometer, which was usually about as exciting as it got. With luck, this could turn into a biggy.
They headed towards each other down a straight stretch of road. The police driver was thinking about braking and skidding sideways to block the road when the other vehicle switched lanes and drove straight at him. He panicked, and panicked even more when the other car flicked to full beam. Because of the height of the approaching vehicle in relation to the low-slung Granada, the driver could see nothing but a wall of white light. He gripped the wheel helplessly, while his colleague, who was pumped up with adrenalin, yelled at him to stay on course.
‘He’s not gonna swerve,’ wailed the driver.
‘Ram the fucker!’
‘We’re all fuckin’ mincemeat!’
‘Just steer the fucker straight. I’m saying a fiver the other feller’s chicken.’
As the Range Rover bore down on him, the driver considered his options in the little time left. He was not a hero, he decided, but he had gone close enough to talk it up. So he wrenched the wheel over, hoping that the other driver wouldn’t do the same, and shut his eyes. The two cars shot past each other at speed, scraping sides, wing mirrors flying.
‘Brilliant!’ shouted the other policeman. ‘But you shouldn’ta swerved.’
‘And if I hadn’t you’d be a fuckin’ paraplegic,’ yelled the driver, who felt a moment’s exhilaration at the closeness of the call, then saw he was losing control on the wet surface. In a moment of liquid fear he muddled the controls and floored the accelerator, a silly mistake, but one – he realized as he made it – that could be taken for defiant machismo. They mounted the pavement with a jolt. Bystanders scattered as the car slammed up the grass bank. It was the turn of the other policeman to get nervous.
‘Steady up, for Chrissake!’
Blurred figures filled the windscreen and the driver shut his eyes again and waited for the impact that never came. Instead the car shot through empty space, where moments before a crowd had been, leaving behind long, impressive crescents of tyre scars, and rejoined the road some seventy yards later, just avoiding the two army jeeps that were back in the chase.
‘Geronimo!’ yelled the driver, feeling better now his foot was unstuck and he had seen his colleague’s fear. They were halfway to being a canteen legend.
They argued later about whether without the helicopter the Range Rover would have got away. By then there was a full alert and the helicopter spotted it on a main road heading towards the M2 that ran north from the city.
It swooped low and settled in over the vehicle, coordinating the movements of the ground patrols. A second police car joined the chase as the Range Rover turned away from the motorway for narrower roads that became wooded and harder to monitor from the air.
The helicopter suddenly announced it was losing it. By then the most recent police car in the chase was half a minute behind and the rest a minute and more away. The helicopter observer said he thought the Range Rover was probably driving without lights.
They only found it because the police car at the head of the chase ran over something lying in the road which the Range Rover had also hit with more disastrous consequences. The impact had sent the stolen vehicle careering down a bank and into a large tree, which had smashed the car’s electrical system, buckled the bonnet and sent a plume of steam up into the wet night air.
The police car had only skidded after its collision. The driver’s first thought was that he had hit a deer.
He got out and went back to look. He noticed an abandoned shoe and didn’t at first connect it with whatever was lying in the road. Then, closer to, he saw a trouser leg with a white strip of flesh above the sock. The rest of the figure was harder to make out. There was some sort of grubby coat so soggy with rain that it looked from a distance like the pelt of a dead animal. The driver thought the coat was covering the head, then realized, with a lurch of his stomach, what it was spread all over the tarmac, the scramble of pink and grey-white, squashed flat. He took in the pulp of brains, smashed bits of skull and an object that he couldn’t identify, then recognized – between spontaneous heaves of vomiting – as a tongue.
3
‘WHY do they need me? Why can’t traffic deal with it?’ Cross was irritable and felt like taking it out on the desk sergeant on the phone.
‘Traff
ic’s already there. There’s something they think you should see, sir.’
The crash site was right on the edge of his district. A couple of miles further and it would have been someone else’s problem. He put down the phone and looked at Deidre, annoyed to realize that he still desired her, in spite of everything they’d just said.
He had not suspected, though now he could see the signs had been there for years – in the growing distance between them since Fiona’s birth, and in Deidre’s exasperation at his lack of ambition. Top promotion, once within his range, would have allowed her the sort of reflected glory she enjoyed. Cross had always admired her social skills. It pleased him to see how wanted she was by other women’s husbands. He had felt unthreatened by this until now.
He embraced her before leaving, breathing in her scent and warmth, sensing her resistance.
The garage was accessible from the kitchen. Cross was grateful for this basic security. He took the torch from the shelf and went through the tedious routine of getting down on all fours and peering under the engine, sweeping the beam along the chassis and up into the wheel arches. It was humiliating going through this ritual every time he wanted to use the car and he always felt stupid crouched down on the concrete floor.
The children’s bicycles were in the way as usual and had to be moved. He stood staring blankly at Mattie’s bike, thinking how ridiculous it was for the boy’s grandparents to give him such an expensive one, and far too big for him. He didn’t know yet what to think about Deidre, or if it changed everything.
He got in the car, turned the ignition and held his breath. As thorough as his checks were, he always tensed in expectation of the blast that would rip away his legs and most of the rest of him.
Cross hadn’t known what to make of that afternoon’s hearing. He had been exonerated, as expected, and the woman who had brought the charge referred to psychiatric care.
Listening to the dreary process of bureaucracy running its course, Cross had an overwhelming desire to scream. The whole thing was an extraordinary waste of time. Markham, the board’s senior policeman, admitted as much afterwards. The RUC had become absurdly cautious about internal discipline since the arrival of a special team from England, headed by Deputy Chief Constable Stalker, to investigate accusations of deliberate assassinations carried out by the RUC on members of the Provisional IRA. The official line invariably was that the police had reacted to an armed response, though privately it was openly and gleefully admitted that the victims had been ambushed. Anyway, several of the dead men were wanted for the murders of police officers, so within the force their deaths were seen as fair retaliation.
‘Stalker’s an idiot and it’ll end in tears, mark my words,’ said Markham. ‘We’re left walking on bloody egg shells. Try getting a surveillance operation mounted and see where that gets you. Try getting anything done, for that matter. And how much is it all costing? They’ve been here months.’
According to Markham, no one had properly defined the Englishman’s brief to him.
‘The man’s blundering around, thinking that he’s going to arrive at the truth and expose it to the world. Hah! And he’s a Catholic to boot, like you.’
Cross caught Markham’s crafty glance.
‘I think so, sir.’
Markham grunted as though this explained everything. Cross was uncomfortably aware that his religious background put him at odds with the rest of the force, and his English origins put him at a further remove. For years he had thought Deidre was joking when she said, ‘But, darling, we loathe the Brits.’
After the hearing Cross had gone to his divisional barracks, a monument to the city’s Victorian prosperity, now desperate and distinguished by peeling paintwork and rising damp. Behind the makeshift shell of grilles and fences and security fortifications that protected the outside from attack, the core was rotten and neglected. It had been due an overhaul for years but with the threat of terrorist reprisals against contractors working for the security forces the work got endlessly delayed. Cross’s office – a dark room with bars through which the sun rarely shone – smelled of mildew.
He sat at his desk, too shy to seek out his colleagues and announce his return. That could wait. He phoned Deidre at the tourist board. She was out and he left a message. When she called back he told her the news. She sounded pleased and relieved. ‘At last things can get back to normal.’
Cross wondered what normal was; certainly not going out to celebrate in some fancy new restaurant that Deidre wanted to try. He pleaded exhaustion, making sure not to upset her, and they compromised without too much fuss. Such cautious politeness was a recent feature of their marriage.
‘I’ll cook us decent steaks and do the potatoes you like,’ she offered. Dauphinoise or Lyonnaise, he could never remember. He said he would pick up a bottle of wine and promised to be back early.
As he was about to leave, Hargreaves, one of his detective sergeants, stopped off at his office. ‘They said on the gate you were back. Bloody good thing too, sir. I had a lot of money riding on the verdict.’
They laughed. It was no surprise to Cross that there had been an office sweepstake on the outcome.
‘We’ve got a new recruit. A WPC,’ Hargreaves went on, rolling his eyes. ‘From Charley’s Angels.’
Charley’s Angels was a unit dealing with sex abuse victims. Cross asked what she was like.
‘Bit bright for me.’ Hargreaves was wary of intelligence, especially in female officers, as it usually came at the expense of common sense.
Cross was never sure how much he liked Hargreaves, but he felt at ease with him in the security of his dingy office, which seemed far more his than his expensive home.
Hargreaves was a good detective but tended to coast on a reputation acquired from a couple of tough postings, including Crossmaglen, and was clever at bunking off in slack periods. He lived alone and his free time was spent building a boat. There was a wife somewhere and a daughter in a wheelchair, crippled from birth. Hargreaves only mentioned her when he was drunk, and usually added, with tears in his eyes, that he needed all the overtime he could get to pay to have her looked after.
They’d ended up in the bar to celebrate Cross’s return and, as he was about to go, were joined by a group of detective constables. He left as one constable was daring another to eat the contents of an ashtray for five pounds.
Cross telephoned Deidre to say that he had been delayed, calculated that he was all right to drive and arrived home to face her disapproval, which increased after smelling the drink on him.
‘I don’t suppose you remembered the wine.’
He hadn’t. He worked hard to mollify her while she cooked the steak and he prepared a salad and laid the table. ‘In here or the dining room?’ he asked.
‘Oh, in here, don’t you think?’
Again this deadly politeness, when neither of them really cared where they ate. Cross saw later that he should have taken more warning of Deidre’s initial mood. On what moment of negligence, or look, or careless expression the evening had turned, he was not sure. The ostensible row had been about giving a party to mark the outcome of the hearing, but even then he was aware of more being at stake than a well rehearsed argument about her gregariousness and his lack. Suspecting that his absence of social commitment was being taken for a lack of deeper devotion, Cross relented. ‘Go ahead and have the party, then.’
He shrank at the prospect. It would be an excuse to invite a lot of Deidre’s friends. His colleagues were a cut beneath her.
‘I’m just trying to organize us some fun,’ she said.
‘Let’s go to bed, then.’
She regarded him almost fearfully. He ploughed on, trying to lighten the mood.
‘I was rather hoping that part of your celebrations would include an assault on my diminished libido.’
The effect of the remark was extraordinary. Deidre seemed to burst apart with anger.
‘It’s always your fucking needs. Me, me, me. Did you thi
nk of me once in all these fuckless weeks? Did you ever think of trying to reassure me?’
She banged the table to emphasize the point. Cross floundered in the wake of her anger, trying to persuade himself that the row might still resolve itself in bed. Fights had become their main way of initiating sex. But Deidre was intransigent.
‘You come home late. You forget to bring any wine. You make boring small talk through the meal. You can’t see beyond yourself and your own little world and its problems and for the last God knows how long you’ve been a complete pain in the arse to live with, and now you expect me to come upstairs with you and lie back, open my legs and let you shag me.’
Cross smiled, still trying to salvage something.
‘Oh, boy. You don’t have a clue, do you?’
‘What are you talking about?’
Deidre said nothing and he realized he’d known for some time what was coming.
‘I’m seeing someone else. You should know that. I hadn’t meant to tell you, but now I’ve said it.’
The effect was as abrupt and shocking as if he had been thrown into icy water from a speeding boat. His surprise must have shown. Deidre laughed weakly.
‘Fine detective you are.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘What difference does it make? It’s none of your business.’
‘It is.’ He had never seen her so angry.
‘The fact I’m fucking another man might be your business, but who he is has nothing to do with you.’
‘It does if I know him.’
‘Christ! Me, fuck one of your friends?’
He wondered how often she had done this to him before.
4
THE glow of lights announced the accident site up ahead. The approaching scene revealed enough vehicles to start a carnival, far more than usual. Cross parked and walked the last hundred yards. He reacquainted himself with the familiar sights – the police lights around the tented-off body being attended to by the scene-of-crime squad. Everyone went about their business with a grimhumoured detachment, professional indifference reducing the corpse to an afterthought, to angles of calculation, measurement, geometry and Polaroids.