by Chris Petit
And now that man was him.
Cross shook his head at the devilish cunning of it all. These people made Candlestick look almost naïve. The deal was clear: Cross’s silence in exchange for theirs. Even if he did leak anything it would be immediately discredited as he would be arrested and charged with collusion to murder.
‘Murder?’ said Cross when Moffat had mentioned it. He wondered for a moment if Moffat was going to try and pin Candlestick’s death on him.
‘This tout who was shot the other day, Vincent O’Connor,’ said Moffat. ‘You had dealings with him, I understand.’
Cross nodded slowly.
‘Well, old son, here’s the speculative thought for the day. Said Vincent’s as dead as doornails and I’ll be bound that this RUC man who was fingered by young Vinnie was the one who fingered him in return to the Provos. Collusion to murder. The tabloid newspapers would turn that man into a monster.’
For two days Cross had found himself walking the city. Instead of going to work he walked, looping through Catholic and Protestant areas without regard and without knowing why. Only once was he stopped, by a youth in Protestant Ballymacarrett who asked abruptly where he thought he was going. Cross brushed him aside and went on unchecked. His mind felt drained. At the end of the first day he’d gone home as though everything was normal and read to the children and watched television with Deidre. The following day she’d looked at him oddly when he said, ‘I think I’ll get the bus into work.’
He’d walked instead and this time found himself roaming the city centre. He heard the noise first of all without being able to identify it, then saw as he emerged from a side street a great river of people flowing towards the centre. Cross was stunned by the crowd’s size. The whole of the centre of the city had been taken over. There were thousands of them. For a moment he wondered if the spontaneous protest dreamed of by Candlestick would have turned into something like this. Except then it would have been Protestant and Catholic alike, where these were just Protestants marching against the Anglo–Irish Agreement. What if he were to gatecrash the speakers’ platform, he thought, and say, ‘I am an officer of the RUC and I have a statement to read that proves beyond doubt—’? To see Moffat’s face at that moment would be worth it.
Cross stood, letting the crowd move round him. He looked at the sky and thought of Matthew and Mary Ryan and all the rest. He imagined the ghost of Matthew’s innocence, riding untouched with the others in the clouds. He saw Mary Elam reunited with her children and safe from her troubles, saw Maureen McMahon laughing and speeding with the boy Vinnie reckless at her side, and he saw all the others, secure from the likes of Candlestick and Breen, safe once and for all. Several streets away the crowd grew noisy. Cross pulled up his collar and walked on. It was coming on to rain.
62
HE knew what he had to do. Perhaps God had deserted His mansion, but that did not mean he had to do it Candlestick’s way. Perhaps he and Candlestick were the point where the circle joined, where good came of bad.
It took him a week to organize. Then one clear morning he checked carefully under the car as usual before opening the garage door and reversing out. The package was on the seat beside him, twenty foolscap sheets that he had laboriously typed himself. He remembered his briefcase was still in the house and left the car idling on the forecourt while he ran back in for it. Deidre was in the kitchen with the children and called out, asking what he was doing. He told her and hurried across the hall to say goodbye again, sticking his head round the door, saying that he would not be back late. Matthew and Fiona were involved in some game of their own and ignored him. He was glad to see that the boy was less withdrawn. Fiona, being the sturdier, had been quite unscathed by the events of the last weeks and it was her practical sense of play that had helped Matthew back to normality, far more than the efforts of Deidre or himself.
He drove away, experiencing a moment’s doubt about whether he was doing the right thing. Thinking about the meeting he was going to, he wondered if there was an ulterior motive that he wasn’t admitting to himself. No, he decided. His reasons were straightforward.
Westerby was due back from her course that day. It would be difficult seeing her and he had no doubt he would handle it badly by being standoffish and awkward. He berated himself. After everything they had been through – good and bad – it would be sad and ridiculous if they ended up being remote and aloof.
He looked at his watch. He was in good time as he crossed the Lagan and headed south through Ballynafeigh. He switched the radio on and while he fiddled with the dial trying to find some decent music he remembered an old song – wonder wonder wonder who who who wrote the book of love – and tried to think where he had heard it before.
63
WESTERBY spent the day at work waiting to bump into Cross. She was nervous of seeing him. Her leave had been spent lying alone on a beach in the Canaries trying to sort herself out. To her surprise it was not only the events of the barn that had preyed on her mind but her affair with Cross. She wanted it to continue while fully realizing the hopelessness of its chances after what had happened to Matthew. His long recovery would make any relationship between them impossible. Besides, there was the whole business of Moffat and Nesbitt knowing. The mean little trap which they had confronted her with – shop Cross or we’ll destroy the pair of you – had been forgotten in the aftermath of Candlestick’s death. Moffat had said as much in the helicopter on the way back to Belfast while Cross and the boy had slept, exhausted.
Westerby had come back from her holiday with a tan, looking different and wanting to see Cross, only to discover that she had been posted on a course which took her away for another couple of months.
During that first day back at work she changed her mind endlessly. She avoided the canteen in case he was there, then regretted it. She had no idea what his attitude would be. Finally, unable to stand any more, she decided to see him in his office. As she walked down the corridor she rehearsed what to say. Regardless of what he thought, she wanted to tell him that she bore him no hard feelings for what had happened between them. It was something she had entered into with open eyes and wanted. She had loved him and still did, even though she understood that their affair could not continue. She stopped halfway down the corridor, telling herself there was no way she could bring herself to come out with any of this. Just say it, she told herself.
Cross’s door was shut. Westerby knocked. There was no answer. She opened the door. The room was empty and the desk neat, like it hadn’t been used that day.
She was walking back down the corridor when two constables ran past in a hurry. There seemed to be some kind of flap on. When she got back there the main office was in turmoil. She saw Hargreaves looking pale and asked what was going on.
‘It’s DI Cross. He’s been shot.’
She knew as soon as he spoke that he didn’t mean wounded.
The word was that he had shot himself.
His car had been found down a narrow lovers’ lane south of the city. No one had any idea why he had driven there unless it was to kill himself. The gun was still in his hand and there was a single bullet wound to his temple.
It had taken Westerby several days to assemble this information because Cross’s death was subject to a coverup, an irony that she thought he would have appreciated. The semi-official version given out was that Cross had been murdered in the line of duty. A statement had been issued by the Provisional IRA stating as much, and then retracted. The suggestion that it was McMahon’s men avenging their leader’s death was the rumour that held strongest in the barracks. It gave everyone an obvious focus. But as the days passed, that was eroded by a counter-rumour which suggested that Cross had shot himself in a fit of depression.
As she listened to these stories in the office and the canteen, she saw that Cross had been much more of an outsider than she had realized, too remote to have been popular, too thoughtful to have joined in. In a strange way there had come about an almost tangi
ble feeling of relief with his going, an acknowledgement that he had never really been one of them. This was the undercurrent. On the surface everyone expressed shock and dismay.
Westerby did her grieving in private. At night she missed him more than she could have believed, but found herself incapable of crying for him. Her tearless mourning left her brittle and abrasive.
The funeral orations painted a picture of a man she didn’t recognize. The burial service was a full uniformed affair with more top brass than she’d ever seen in one go. She shut her eyes and ears to most of it, trying not to look at the casket and think of him inside. She glimpsed Deidre and Matthew and his sister and wondered if she had the courage to give her condolences afterwards.
Why his left hand? she kept thinking.
Cross had been right handed.
She had phoned the doctor who had examined his body at the scene of the death, without really knowing why beyond trying to allay the turmoil she felt. Her deepest fear was that Cross might have shot himself after all. If he had, she wanted to understand why. But try as she might to reconstruct those final moments she could not see him doing it, even imagine him contemplating it.
The doctor had told her that Cross had been found in the driver’s seat with a bullet through his left temple. The gun was in his hand and there was nothing to suggest that anyone else had been involved. The position of the body and the head wound were consistent with a self-inflicted act. Westerby then spoke to Doody, who had been at the scene of the crime. Doody had been suspicious of her questions at first, but his dislike of Cross got the better of him and he talked freely, confirming what the doctor had said. Doody’s unstated verdict was that Cross didn’t have what it took to be a policeman and the suicide had not surprised him. He added that there had been no additional fingerprints in the car.
‘What state was the ground?’
‘Bone hard,’ said Doody. ‘You’re wasting your time.’
She’d sat in her own car and tried to imagine what might have been going through Cross’s head. It was then that she had first asked herself, Why the left hand?
She’d made a gun of her own left hand and pointed it at her temple, then did it with her right. She would use the right, definitely, and either put the gun against her temple or, to be even more certain, shoot herself through the mouth.
Cross was buried among generations of O’Neills. Westerby noticed the largest wreath was dedicated to Beloved Husband and Father. During the service she felt herself ever more adrift. Nothing squared with her version of events. The dignity, the politeness, the stoic suffering and the fiction of the personal testimonies left her wanting to scream. She was tempted to stand up and say that Cross was a man who had lived among the dead and tidied up after them with a solitary dedication that set him apart from all the careerists come to pay their so-called respects. She wanted to tell them about the pain of the barn and his troubled conscience and how they had both delved deep into the muck of their country’s secrets. She wondered if Moffat was there.
As the funeral ended and the congregation was breaking up Westerby caught sight of a striking, enigmatic woman standing alone, smoking. To her surprise the woman nodded coolly and made her way over. She introduced herself as Miranda Ramsay and said she had something for her from Cross in her car. She used Cross’s first name, Westerby noticed.
They made their way through the crowd and walked in silence the quarter of a mile or so to the car. Westerby was bursting to ask who she was.
‘We met because of Niall Warren,’ Miranda finally announced without being asked.
She unlocked her car and took out a buff envelope.
‘This is for you. He sent it to me for safekeeping.’
Westerby glanced at the envelope. It was sealed and there was no name on it.
Miranda told her that it had come in a larger envelope with a note saying she should pass it on to Westerby if anything happened to him.
‘You’re like he described.’
Westerby frowned, wondering what else Cross had told her. She weighed the envelope in her hands.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know. I only read the part addressed to me.’
‘Did he give any indication that he might kill himself?’ Westerby asked carefully.
Miranda looked shocked and shook her head, frowning.
‘Did he strike you as a man capable of that?’
What Westerby was really wondering was why Cross was using this woman as an intermediary. As far as she remembered, he had never mentioned her. She didn’t like Miranda Ramsay because she could imagine the way she made Cross look at her.
‘I didn’t know him well enough to say.’
It was said with such regret that Westerby realized there was a troubled sadness to her not apparent before. They stood in awkward silence, uncertain how to part. Westerby was aware of being inspected.
‘So you were the copper’s ride?’
Westerby was jolted by the sudden crudeness of the remark, and the reduction of their affair to something crass and dirty.
‘Did he tell you he had me too? In the Europa Hotel.’
Westerby’s shock turned to anger at the idea of Cross and her.
‘So,’ Miranda went on, apparently oblivious to Westerby’s upset, ‘we have something in common. I was sorry not to have known him better.’
She leaned forward impulsively and brushed her lips against Westerby’s cheek, and said, ‘Sad days.’
She left the funeral without talking to anyone else or going to the wake. Instead she went home and changed, turned on the fire and settled down to read Cross’s document. Glancing through the pages, she thought what a painful struggle it must have been for him to have typed. Each page was littered with little spots of white correction fluid. The sight of these pathetic blobs was too much for her. For some reason she also remembered that Shel Silverstein had not written ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ as she had once told Cross. It was Jim Steinman and now she had no way of telling him, and she broke down for the first time since the barn, bawling out her rage and loss, and fear and confusion. Then, when she thought she was drained of any further feeling, she shocked herself by masturbating hard and angrily at his not being there, concentrating all her attention on the gritty core of desire inside her. The shock of her coming jolted her backwards and even as she came she continued to work at herself, kneading herself uncontrollably with the heel of her hand until she fell back gasping and exhausted, wondering what had possessed her.
She felt bad, not about what she had done but for the discovery in herself of such fierce and concentrated emotion. After the barn she had believed there was nothing left to know about herself, that she had seen and survived the worst.
She read Cross’s document in a sober and chastened mood. It filled in all the missing bits for her, particularly Breen’s role as a British agent. She noted too the blank in Candlestick’s life between faking his death and his reemergence to kill Breen. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know,’ concluded Cross at the end of that section.
It was clear that Cross wanted this information to receive a wider hearing. In that he and Candlestick were, ironically, in agreement. Westerby was less certain. She doubted in the end if the story would surface. Too much was in place to stop it. Also she wasn’t sure if she wanted to sabotage her own career. She was no crusader.
She was drawn back into the case in spite of herself. All it took was the question she was bound to ask eventually: if Cross didn’t kill himself, then who did?
The obvious answer was the Provisionals, except why did they deny it after the initial claim? The IRA was always keen to publicize its killings for propaganda – another crown copper dead. Because of what Cross knew about the INLA it was possible it had got rid of him, but that organization too would have announced the shooting.
If he had been killed by the security forces – because it was known what he knew and known that he intended to take it further – Westerby wonder
ed shakily where that left her. Was she a target too? The feeling grew, feeding her incipient paranoia. What made it worse now Cross was gone was that she had no one to talk to. She realized she was quite friendless. Cross’s favouritism had isolated her from her colleagues, who now gossiped behind her back about their affair. As for a life outside of the force, that had long gone, with the irregular hours and the overtime.
People and events slithered past her and Westerby was aware of the tight grip of anxiety on the back of her neck, and wondered if she was next. She thought she might be suffering delayed post-traumatic stress, but didn’t do anything about it because in the macho world of the RUC any sign of weakness, especially in a woman, was taken as a sign that you were not up to the job.
This had happened to her once already, when she had asked to be relieved from the sex abuse unit. At some point, the parade of scarred women and buggered children had got under her skin – the memory of them still worked away inside her like larvae. Worse, she had been in danger of becoming inured and immune. And worst of all, she sometimes found herself actively hating the whiny voices, the pathetic excuses, and the flinches of the victims. Not the kids, just the women, but how long would it have been before her indifference extended to the children?
Sometimes everything felt so weird that she wondered if she wasn’t part of Cross’s dying dream. But the nightmare is over, she kept telling herself. It should have ended in the barn. So why does it feel like it’s still going on?
There was something she was missing, she kept telling herself, something she had noticed but overlooked. Some message from the dead.
She read over Cross’s pages until she had memorized whole chunks of them, and read back over Candlestick’s notebook, trying to work out what it was he was withholding. She got out the files on each of the murders and reluctantly studied the scene-of-crime photographs. Some message from the dead, she kept telling herself. Breen lying headless in the road told her nothing. Nor the photograph of Mary Elam with her half-shut eyes slid away to one side, like she was slyly looking at something out of the picture. Wheen’s death showed a crumpled figure folded into his own boot and Arnold’s photographs were still with Special Branch. She hadn’t been there for Mary Ryan’s death and her scene-of-crime pictures, which she hadn’t seen before, shocked her more than the others: the stark frenzy of the mutilation and the discarded body with its legs so obscenely parted.