by Derek Fee
‘Where will we operate out of?’
‘Do you have a preference?’
‘I’d like to stay in the centre of Belfast. What about personnel? I’ll need a minimum of five detectives. There are two still active so that means three new officers. One of them should be a sergeant.’
‘Done. I’ll have some names for you soon.’
Wilson scratched his head. He’d been threequarters of the way to making a decision to leave the PSNI. He wasn’t sure he should say yes to a new challenge. Maybe the time was right to make a break from his old life. Go somewhere new and make a start doing something else. Who was he kidding? He wouldn’t fit in anywhere else and he’d spent twenty years putting miscreants behind bars. Was he ready to swop a career he had built up to run a bar in Tenerife? He didn’t think so, but he also wasn’t sure that his new big boss was on the level. ‘How long do I have to make my mind up?’
‘I have to say goodbye to Donald and Miriam.’ Baird stood up and took his jacket from the chair before heading in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Shall we say five minutes,’ he said over his shoulder.
Wilson smiled. He’d been right about Baird. He was a leader of men. Maybe it was time to toss his hat into the ring. -- again. And there was always Sammy Rice to find. One last try, he thought, before he switched to pulling pints for holidaymakers.
Baird had already put on his jacket by the time he returned to the dining room.
Wilson extended his hand. ‘I’m on board.’
‘I thought as much,’ Baird shook hands. ‘We’ll expect you back next Monday. I’ll have the files of your new recruits on your desk. I’m looking forward to working with you.’
‘I doubt you’ll be saying that in a few months,’ Spence said joining them.
Baird looked at his watch. ‘I’m already late.’ He turned to Wilson. ‘I saw you play. You were something else.’ Then he was gone
Spence saw Baird to the door and returned to Wilson. ‘I knew he was set for the top the first day I met him. He’s got that ability to concentrate on you and make you believe that you’re the only person in the room. But don’t be swayed by the easy manner. Norman is as hard as nails and he’s one hell of a politician. If it’s ever his neck or yours, then prepare to lose your neck. Whatever you do, do not underestimate him.’
‘Was all this your idea?’ Wilson asked.
‘I’d like to take the credit but he wanted you anyway.’
‘So, he ran it by you first?’
‘He’s not a man who takes chances. He wanted to know what I thought and he wanted to meet you outside the job.’
CHAPTER THREE
Richie Simpson looked around his current lodgings, a downstairs room in a two up two down with a shared bathroom. It was a far cry from the suite of rooms he had occupied on the top floor of the building on the Shankill Road housing the Ulster Democratic Union office. He chuckled to himself. Had he really been so naïve? Had he really believed that the UDU was intended to live on beyond the retirement of the man who had set it up as his personal vehicle? The UDU was on life support from the day Jackie Carlisle walked out of its office for the last time. That life support had nothing to do with electricity, it was all about money and Carlisle had left just enough in the coffers to cover the next month’s rent on the offices. Simpson looked at all the rubbish lying around his room. His restricted accommodation had put him in spring-cleaning mode, although spring was long past. He hadn’t realised the amount of crap he had collected and that was now stuffed into every corner. He sat with a cup of coffee spying the two black bags full of rubbish he had already collected. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered some TV guru saying that one of the first stages of a prospective suicide was to start cleaning out their life. If that was the case, half of Scandinavia must be on suicide watch. Simpson had no intention of committing suicide although he had plenty of reasons to contemplate an escape from life. He was broke, he had no job and was living on state benefits, and he realised belatedly that the gun he had used to shoot Sammy Rice was in the possession of Davie Best, the right hand man of the current biggest, in more ways than one, Belfast crime lord. To add to his level of despair, the only man who could have helped him out of his current mess was the man who put him in it. Jackie Carlisle, founder of the UDU and its principal beneficiary, had been put in the ground two months previously. Times had been hard for Simpson since the demise of the UDU. In contrast, Carlisle was given the funeral he’d dreamed of. A flag- bedecked coffin had been paraded along the Shankill Road before a respectful Protestant community. The people he had served so well had bid farewell to one of their heroes at a packed First Presbyterian Church in Rosemary Street. The Moderator had led the congregation in prayer for the soul of the departed son of Ulster. Membership of the congregation was by invitation only and Simpson waited until the last moment to receive his. When he realised that he wasn’t going to be invited, he prevailed on Carlisle’s widow. As soon as he heard that Carlisle was dead, he had harboured the hope that he might be included in some small way in the will of the Great Man. As the weeks went by, he realised that he had been nurturing a forlorn hope. Richie Simpson’s salvation was not in the hands of his former boss. When he did a stocktaking of his situation, he wondered why he wasn’t contemplating suicide. Perhaps he was but it was so deeply set in his mind that he refused to recognise it. He’d always thought of himself as one of those types who would get up immediately when knocked down, but that image was trashed two months after Carlisle left him in charge of the moribund Ulster Democratic Union. Simpson considered himself to be multi-talented. After all, few people could claim to have been a political fixer, a tout for British Military Intelligence and a murderer. Well few people except several inmates of Crumlin Road prison. Unfortunately, Simpson’s attributes were not the type that were currently in demand at his local job centre. In his mind, the spring-cleaning was simply the first step in de-cluttering his life and sloughing off the last vestiges of his former life as Carlisle’s dogsbody. During the weeks after the Sammy Rice affair, he had scoured the newspapers for any mention of the disappearance of the crime lord. Sammy had vanished off the face of the earth and nobody appeared to give a flying fuck. The last he had seen of Sammy was his corpse lying in a disused warehouse. He assumed that Best and his friends had incorporated Sammy into the structure of a new building or perhaps they had gone all Mafia and Sammy was sleeping with the fishes in the Lagan. Despite the silence as to Sammy’s ultimate resting place, Simpson hadn’t been sleeping well. Even a dead Sammy Rice could throw the fear of God into you. Whatever the future, Simpson knew that Best and McGreary had him by the balls. They had the murder weapon and his fingerprints were all over it. If Sammy’s body did manage to resurface, he would be securely in the frame for the murder. Life was certainly pissing on Richie Simpson. He finished his coffee and got to his feet. There was more crap to sort through and get rid of. He started rooting around in the bottom of one of his wardrobes. There were several boxes there that he didn’t recognise. He pulled out one and ripped off the sealing tape. The box contained a series of files all bearing the logo of the now-defunct Ulster Democratic Union. Simpson had no idea how this box had made its way to his flat. The day that Carlisle left their office in the Lower Shankill every scrap of paper was boxed and delivered to Carlisle’s house in Hillsborough. Carlisle had overseen the operation himself, and when it was completed there wasn’t so much as a sheet of paper left in the office. Carlisle was also abstemious in making sure that the hard disk of his computer was wiped clean to the extent of putting a magnet next to his computer. He obviously wanted to obliterate any evidence that could be used against him in the future. He didn’t know at that time that the Grim Reaper had already taken care of his future. It appeared that somehow two boxes were diverted to Simpson’s modest abode. He removed one box and carried it to his coffee table. He took out the top file and began to read the contents. Two hours later he had read every file in the box and had confir
med everything he knew about politics. It was the most venal of professions. Carlisle’s constituents, who voted for him religiously, were in constant contact with the Great Man. His replies to their entreaties promised the earth, but were aimed at delivering nothing. He would speak to so-and-so concerning their problem and would let them know the result in the fullness of time. Simpson closed the final file and tossed the box on the floor. There was still one box of equally irrelevant trash to go through. He took the second box from the wardrobe and put it on the coffee table. He ripped open the sealing tape, and looked into a box full of black Moleskine notebooks. He had often seen Carlisle scribbling in these books. There had to be twenty of the small notebooks in the box. He picked out one and opened it. The front page had ‘1972’ as its title. It was a diary of sorts. He turned the page and sure enough there was the scrawl he recognised so well. This was a treasure trove. These small black books contained the inner thoughts of one of the men who had been at the centre of the fight to keep Ulster British. Simpson went to the kitchen and made himself a fresh cup of coffee. He had a long day of reading ahead.
Six hours later Simpson’s eyes were aching and his brain was addled at the banality of Carlisle’s thoughts. Nobody would ever see a printed version of these scribblings on the shelves of Waterstones, or any other bookseller for that matter. Simpson was up to 1976 and there was not a single useable nugget. Carlisle had been neither a fighter nor a fucker so there was nothing that was even mildly interesting to either the historian or the seeker of lurid details. Why hadn’t Carlisle hooked up with Margaret Thatcher or even some non-descript British MP? A male or female MP would have done. Simpson felt like a gold miner panning away hoping to come across that big nugget that would forever change his life. He picked up the next notebook in the hope that it would yield that life-changing titbit.
When the light began to fade, Simpson was obliged to put on the table lamp. Where had the day gone? The diaries had become a trifle more interesting as the ‘Troubles’ escalated, but Carlisle was always peripheral to the action and his personal life was still as dull as ditchwater. He was about to call it a day when a loose piece of paper tumbled from one of the notebooks he was handling. He picked it up and saw that it was a map of sorts. It was crudely drawn and he laid it out on the coffee table. The area of townland was marked as Ballynahone. Simpson didn’t know where it was so he consulted Google maps on his computer. He found that Ballynahone was in county Antrim and was famous as an area of natural bogland. What the hell had Jackie Carlisle to do with bogland? The rough map showed a road and some geographical features and most specifically a small cross and the name ‘Evans’ beside it. Simpson had no idea who or what the ‘Evans’ signified. The book dated from the 1980s so referred to a time long before he had become Carlisle’s factotum. But it was during the time when Carlisle’s star had been in the ascendant. It was strange reading the notebooks. Carlisle had been a nobody throughout the early 1970s, but suddenly in the 1980s he had found his mojo and began a steady climb up the political ladder. It was about that time that his influence with the Protestant paramilitaries increased. It was noticeable that around this period there was more money around to support Carlisle’s election fund. The 1980s had been Carlisle’s golden years. Simpson fired up his computer again and put in the name ‘Evans’ and Northern Ireland. At the top of the results was Jonny Evans the former Manchester United and current West Bromwich defender. He had to scroll down several pages before he found a reference to Alan Evans, a minor Ulster politician who had disappeared in 1984 and had never been heard of again. According to several articles, it was assumed that Evans had been a victim of the IRA and had been “disappeared”. Simpson finished reading all the articles. He closed the lid of his laptop and looked at the map on his coffee table. Could this possibly be the place where Evans had been ‘disappeared’ to? And if so how did the location of a man who had been “disappeared” by the IRA fall into the hands of a Loyalist politician? Perhaps Carlisle had left him a treasure map after all. He settled back in his chair. He needed to think how he could turn this information into money.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Morning, sir.’ The desk sergeant smiled widely as Wilson walked into the station. ‘Good to have you back.’
‘Morning, Billy,’ Wilson returned the smile. ‘It’s good to be back.’ It was almost six weeks since he’s been to the station; the longest period he’d been away in more than five years. He was gratified that nothing appeared to have changed. Well, physically nothing had changed but there was one major philosophical change. Donald Spence was no longer in charge. Wilson had, in his inside pocket, a letter signed by the Chief Constable appointing him as head of the regional murder squad. It was in effect his old job but with a regional focus. He would be required to assist police throughout the province in investigating murder on their patch. It was a challenge that he relished. As far as he knew, there were no impending investigations outside Belfast but that could change quickly. He already decided that his first priority would be to clear up the murders of Grant, Malone and O’Reilly. That meant that his first priority was to locate the whereabouts of Sammy Rice, his prime suspect for the crimes. He breathed in the air of the station. It was a strange mixture of stale beer, testosterone and the synthetic smell of the cleaning agents. His dead wife, rightly or wrongly, described it as his womb. It was true that he felt more at home there than anywhere else. He was about to make his way to the murder squad room when Billy put up his hand.
‘The boss wants to see you immediately you came in.’
Wilson’s smile disappeared. Donald Spence’s replacement was Chief Superintendent Yvonne Davis. He’d never worked with her but he’d heard a lot about her. She was newly promoted to her post as Chief Superintendent. Like him, she was one of the new Chief Constable’s personal appointments. Word had it that she was destined for the top. He went immediately to Spence’s old office. Donald’s name was already removed from the door and a new plaque announced it was now the office of Chief Superintendent Yvonne Davis. The guard was well and truly changed. He entered the outer office and the secretary asked him to wait. The Boss was on the telephone. Five minutes later, the secretary announced him and nodded at the door to the inner office.
Yvonne Davis stood as soon as Wilson entered and came out from behind her imposing desk. She was of medium height and was wearing a black regulation skirt and a white shirt with a diamond and star on the epaulettes. Her hair was cut short and was salt and pepper. She obviously had no desire to hide the grey. She had an open pleasant face and a pair of blue eyes that sparkled. She looked fit for her fifty something years. She extended her hand towards Wilson. ‘Superintendent Wilson, I’ve been looking forward to this.’
Wilson took her hand. ‘Congratulations on your new appointment, ma’am,’ he said.
She smiled. ‘Thanks, please take a seat.’
She moved back behind the desk while Wilson took the seat directly facing her.
She looked at Wilson half lounging in the seat. She been told that he was a handsome devil and that hadn’t been a lie. If she had been twenty years younger and without her experience of men, she might have batted her eyelids at him. But that day was long gone. His posture exuded confidence. She cleared her throat. ‘I wanted us to meet before you get swamped with work,’ she said leaning forward. ‘As soon as I was appointed, I received several phone calls offering me advice. One was from Deputy Chief Constable Jennings who, after wishing me well, launched into a diatribe against you. Apparently, you are a dangerous psychopath, a career wrecker who must be carefully managed if one is to avoid disaster. The second call I received was from Donald Spence. After congratulating me, he gave me a rundown on the station and the personnel. He was exceptionally complimentary about you. In his opinion, you are the finest policeman he’s ever worked with. So, Superintendent, what are you devil or angel?’
Wilson was smiling. ‘I suppose a bit of both, ma’am.’
‘My intuition tell
s me that you could be like a bold child. Such children are interesting, but trying.’
Wilson laughed. ‘No one has described me in those terms.’
‘I’ve raised three bold children, and it took me twenty years to get rid of what was a very bold husband. So I have a lot of experience. How long do you think you’re going to last?’
‘I love this job and I do it to the best of my ability. I didn’t join the police force to win friends and influence people. I joined to put criminals where they belong, behind bars. Donald Spence and I were on the same wavelength as far as why we did what we did. I’m aware that I ruffled the feathers of some of the big birds but I am who I am.’
She had heard a lot about Wilson and she could see that most of it was true. He had huge respect among the rank and file but was detested in Castlereagh. She was ready to develop her own opinion of him. ‘I hope that we’re going to get along.’
‘I’m sure we are, ma’am.’ It wasn’t going to be the same as it was with Donald but that had been special.
‘I like to meet my senior officers early on Monday morning for a general briefing.’ She could see from Wilson’s face that this didn’t particularly please him. ‘You don’t do meetings, I assume.’
‘Murder investigations are fluid. Sometimes I may not be available first thing Monday morning.’
‘Then I’ll be happy to excuse you. In the meantime, you will attend.’ She looked at her watch. ‘The first meeting is in twenty-five minutes.’ She stood up. ‘I’m looking forward to working with you, Superintendent. I have a feeling it’s going to be a challenge.’
Wilson would have been slow to admit it but Davis had impressed him. She had displayed that she was in control and he had a feeling that she was competent. He didn’t have a view on whether he would develop the same relationship with her that he had with Spence but it wasn’t a bad start.