McArthur and I finished the bottle of whiskey between us.
“I suppose we’re just unlucky, sir, to have this on your watch.”
“Or lucky. Depends on your point of view.”
“What do you mean, sir?”
“Back where I’m from—across the water—people do what, exactly? Go to the shopping mall, go to the garden center, watch the fucking football? Eighty years of that until you die in a hospital bed, fat and alone, suffering from cancer or congestive heart failure. Our ancestors were hunters, Duffy. Survival of the fittest! A thousand generations of hunters. Hunters not bloody shoppers! And at least here we’re fighting for a better tomorrow.”
“Er, that’s not the speech you’re going to give to the men, is it?” I said anxiously.
“Why shouldn’t I?”
I thought about McCrabban. “Well, for one thing most of them are quite religious, sir.”
“Look, Duffy, maybe the forces of chaos will win, probably they will win, but we’ll give them a hell of a fight of it, eh, Sean, eh?”
He yawned heavily and I was relieved to see that it was just the whiskey talking. “Yes, sir,” I replied in a monotone.
He stared at me, his eyes like Elmer Fudd’s in Hare-Brained Hypnotist.
“Sir, if you don’t mind, I have a dinner engagement with a young lady.”
“What? A young lady? Lucky you. Yeah, you should go. Go to your dinner and then go to bed, Duffy. For sleep, mind you! Get some sleep in, now. I don’t think we’re going to get much of it over the next few weeks.”
9: CONTACT HIGH
The morning of November 15, 1985. Gentle rain falling over Ulster, falling over a country on the verge of the biggest crisis since the Hunger Strikes. How can you police a society facing a general uprising? How can you investigate a murder in a time of incipient civil war?
The beeper, of course, was going in the living room, but I didn’t want to go downstairs and get it.
I wanted to stay here in bed. With her.
Sara Prentice’s sleeping face. Strange and intelligent and beautiful in the blue flame of the paraffin heater.
Her green eyes opened. She smiled.
“What are you doing, Sean?”
“Looking at you.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
She shook her head. “Have you got any ciggies?”
I lit her one.
She sat up in the bed and stared at me. “Two can play at that game,” she said. She stared at me and tapped me on the forehead. “So, what is it that makes Sean Duffy tick?”
“This isn’t for a story, is it?”
She laughed. “Ha! Don’t flatter yourself . . . Although you were in the papers a couple of years back, weren’t you, Sean? Around the time of the DeLorean scandal. Your name was in the index.”
I said nothing.
“Don’t worry, though. You’re old news now. In a place with a slower news cycle you might be a story, but here? That’s ancient history.”
“That’s a relief.”
“But I’m curious. For me. What makes Sean Duffy tick? What’s a nice Catholic boy doing in the Protestant RUC?”
“I ask myself the same question.”
“And what’s the answer?”
She was looking at me with unfeigned interest. Not professional interest. Just boyfriend—girlfriend interest. At least I hoped it was that. It was an uncomfortable question. A metaphysical question. I’d been avoiding those kinds of questions for a long time now.
“Well, initially, I thought I could make a difference . . . Ten years ago now. I thought I could maybe help put an end to the madness.”
“And now?”
“Now I realize that one man can do very little.”
She nodded. “You look so sad, Sean. Stay there. I’ll go make you some breakfast.”
She came back with coffee and burnt toast. I ate it. I was grateful for the effort.
“So, what do you think is going to happen today?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.”
What happened was: riots, strikes, rallies, demonstrations. And over the coming days: power cuts, graffiti on police station walls, Loyalist youths attacking peelers in safe Protestant districts.
Operation Black was instituted for CID; all investigations were suspended and detectives were seconded to riot duty.
“Hard-working senior and junior detectives seconded to riot duty!” I heard myself saying to McCrabban in the office one morning. But we all understood. The threat was existential. Northern Ireland had always been a place that was born bristling with paradox. All countries are illusions, but in the six counties of the north of Ireland the magic act had never been very convincing.
The first full day of Operation Black we spent on riot duty in North Belfast, standing like eejits in the rain under our Perspex shields while weans from the surrounding streets threw stones and half-bricks at us. Lawson and Fletcher were terrified. Crabbie and I didn’t like it. And it would only get worse when the Protestant kids learned how to make Molotov cocktails and petrol bombs. A riot was a frost fair, a jubilee, an escape from the dreariness of everyday life.
The second day of Operation Black we spent on riot duty in West Belfast, going to the Shankill Road in the morning and the Falls Road in the afternoon and night. Attacked by Protestant kids and then Catholic kids on the same day. Nice.
It didn’t help that no one came forward to defend the Agreement at all. The Irish ran from it. The British were quickly embarrassed by it. One brave local Unionist politician, John Cranston, did quote from Bernard Williams’ Which Slopes Are Slippery? but Cranston was howled down by colleagues who preferred to quote from the books of Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. Ulster Protestants were a dour, undemonstrative people, and it was the word on the street and in the pulpit that counted, and that word was that the Brits were going to withdraw from Northern Ireland and pass on the job of keeping the peace between the Protestants and Catholics to the US Marines or the UN or, God save us, the two undermanned regiments of the Irish Army . . .
I went home after the third day of rioting to find Mrs. Bridewell standing in her front garden with her arms folded. She was a looker was Mrs. Bridewell, recently divorced, today wearing a little miniskirt and heels with muck-covered gardening gloves. A loose brown hair was hanging fetchingly over her rosy left cheek.
“I’m awful sorry, Mr. Duffy. We’re all awful sorry,” she said.
“Sorry about what?” I began, and then I saw it. Someone had sprayed-painted a swastika on my front door, and underneath it they’d scrawled “SS RUC.”
I nodded to Mrs. Bridewell, turned right, and walked down the street to Bobby Cameron’s house.
I knocked on his door and saw him peering at me through the fisheye security lens.
He opened the door in a white tank top holding an Airfix 1:16 scale Hawker Hurricane. He was still channeling Brian Clough, but this time it was after a home win and a favorable write-up by Hugh McIlvanney in the Daily Express.
“What is it, Duffy? I’m in the middle of doing me models.”
“Someone’s painted a swastika on my front door.”
“Have they? Well, that’s what you get for being part of a fascist organization hell-bent on repressing the Protestant people of Ulster.”
“Did you know one of my new trainees is Jewish? What if I’d had him over for dinner tonight and he’d seen that? Or what if I’d had my girl over? Eh?”
“You make your bed, you lie in it, Duffy. You were out of the RUC and now you’re back in, and you have to take the fucking consequences.”
“I want that swastika off my door tonight, and if anyone ever fucks with my house again, I guarantee you a police raid on your house every night until the end of time.”
“Or until someone murders you.”
“Or until some mad, pissed-off, rogue peeler with nothing much to lose murders you, Bobby.”
“A raid on my house won’t f
ind anything.”
“I’m sure your wife will love seeing all the family valuables in the street. And anyway, by the sixth or seventh raid the forensics boys will be so fed up not finding anything that they will find something . . . do you know what I mean?”
Bobby sighed. “I know what you mean,” he grunted.
“We understand each other, then?”
“Aye.”
“And tell them kids if there’s a repeat of this incident I’ll be keeping Mickey Burke’s lioness in my back garden from now on.”
I went home and put my dinner on. Not too long after that a group of three boys appeared at the front door with paint remover and set to work getting rid of the graffiti.
There would, I knew, be no recurrence of that particular piece of shite, but the Anglo-Irish Agreement shitstorm was only just beginning.
The very next day the Reverend Ian Paisley went on the radio and called for all the young men of Ulster to rise up against “Barry’s Lackeys.” Peter Barry was the Irish foreign minister and we were thus cast as his demonic agents. The nickname stuck and it appeared on graffiti all over Belfast.
The Protestant people were being told by their leaders to rise up against us, the Catholic community didn’t trust us, and the IRA still wanted to kill every last one of us. Perfect.
I pulled the Beemer into the police station car park.
The Chief Inspector was waiting for me at the front desk.
“Sorry, Duffy, need your CID boys and girls again. Riot duty. Rathcoole. You don’t mind?”
“Would it make a difference if I did mind?”
“No.”
“Well then, I don’t mind at all, sir.”
I went into the CID incident room. Fletcher was passing out tea and Jaffa Cakes.
“The bad news is you’re going to have to put down the tea and biscuits. The good news is we’re going to get riot pay!”
“Where?” Crabbie asked.
“Rathcoole.”
“Could be worse,” McCrabban said.
Lawson and Fletcher, however, looked banjaxed. This was only the first week of the crisis and they were exhausted.
“Come on, lads, let’s go show these regular coppers that the CID can hold a riot shield and get pelted like the best of them.”
Fletcher sniffled but got up. Lawson, however, just kept sitting there, dazed. I patted him on the shoulder. “You too, Young Lochinvar, come on, suit up!”
“It’ll be OK. These things are never as bad as they sound,” Crabbie said with a big friendly grin that would have horrified them if they’d known him as well as I did.
The four of us piled in the back of a Land Rover with two regular peelers up front.
“Who saw the football on the telly last night?” I asked to take our minds off the riot.
“A good performance from Liverpool,” Lawson said mechanically.
“They’re an ageing side,” Crabbie said. “The future belongs to Man U.”
“What do you think, Fletcher?” I asked.
“I don’t care.”
“You don’t care?”
“Why do men care about football?”
“Cos football’s important. Football is war without the blood,” Lawson said.
“And sometimes with the blood,” I said, but I changed the conversation to the movies, a subject that would engage both of them.
We reached Rathcoole Estate in North Belfast. I had done riot duty here before many times. It wasn’t just familiarity that bred contempt. There was actual contempt contempt. This was a pretty scary estate with some clever, old-school hoods running things.
We piled out of the Land Rover, and a Divisional Mobile Support Unit chief inspector gave us helmets and the new rectangular riot shields which worked better than the old round ones.
We stood in the Thin Green Line for an hour while the local kids pelted us with stones and milk bottles. I kept our little band on the flank of the line, and when it was our turn to rotate off I checked that none of my lads had been hurt.
Lawson had copped a Molotov on his shield but no one else had got a scratch.
Eventually the order was given to fire plastic bullets and a couple of eager, experienced peelers picked out the ringleaders, aimed, and shot the fuckers with baton rounds. The rain came down after that and the rioters dispersed.
It was a successful little operation and my unit acquitted itself well.
“Well done, everyone,” I said, patting Fletcher and Lawson on the back. “You did very well. We’re going home now and you’ll get good reports from me.”
We piled back into the Rover drenched with sweat and stinking of fear and petrol.
“So where are you from, Fletcher?”
“I was born in Armagh, but I grew up in Enniskillen. My dad moved there for work.”
“I’ve heard it’s nice in Enniskillen.”
“Yes, our house is on the lake.”
“Uh, boss, radio call, we’ve been diverted to another riot in the Ardoyne,” one of the guys from up front said.
“Who’s diverting us?”
“Chief Inspector McArthur.”
“Dammit.”
Up into the twisty streets of the Ardoyne in West Belfast. A much bigger riot involving dozens of Land Rovers and hundreds of people.
Another two hours on the Thin Green Line getting pelted with rocks and bottles and fireworks. Lawson breaking formation and chasing after a kid who’d chucked a brick at his head. Crabbie and I pulling the eejit back into formation.
“Take it easy there, Batman! You’ve done enough for today,” I said.
“Sorry, sir, got carried away there,” he said.
“Be more like Fletcher, son, keep your head down, don’t get baited, don’t get too worked up,” McCrabban instructed him.
Darkness fell. Rotated off the line. Back in the Land Rover.
Too tired for conversation. The four of us in the rear just staring into space.
The Land Rover stopped suddenly.
“What’s happening?” Crabbie asked the men up front.
“I think I’m lost,” our driver said. “I followed the diversion signs but this road is a dead end.”
“Diversion signs?” Crabbie wondered, an ominous note in his voice.
“What diversion signs?” I asked.
“Oh shit! Muzzle flash!”
“Incoming!” I yelled.
“Brace! Brace! Brace!”
“Fuck that, take evasive—”
. . .
. . .
White light.
An almighty bang.
A momentary suspension of the laws of gravity.
A crash against the metal roof that might have done for me if I hadn’t been wearing my riot helmet.
A metallic taste in my mouth.
Blood.
Crabbie taking charge. The back doors opening. Belfast’s crocodile skyline rotating into view.
“Are you OK, Sean?”
Ping, ping, ping off the armor plate of the Land Rover.
“I’m OK. Are we under fire?”
“Stay where you are, Sean; backup is on the way.”
Crabbie with his sidearm out, shooting at gunfire from a ruined block of flats. I crawled toward him, pulled out my Glock.
“Where?” I asked.
“The abandoned building on the corner. Second floor.”
Two more quick muzzle flashes.
I pulled the trigger on the semiautomatic and Crabbie and I shot at the target together.
I emptied my clip, the smell of cordite and blood choking my nostrils.
I blinked slowly and lost consciousness.
Cops.
Soldiers.
“He’s awake.”
“Where am I?”
Where I was was an ambulance being transferred to Belfast City Hospital. They’d hooked me to a drip, but after a minute checking myself I knew that I was fine. No bones broken. No puncture wounds. Just a concussion.
In the hospit
al car park I told the medics I’d see myself into Casualty.
Instead I scored some painkillers and Valium from a sympathetic nurse and called a bloke I knew at Queen Street RUC who sent a Land Rover to take me back to Carrick.
Crabbie was surprised to see me.
“What are you doing here? You should be in the hospital. Did you—”
“How is everyone?”
“Everyone’s OK except for you and Fletcher.”
“What happened to her?”
“Same as you. Banged her head. They took her to the RVH.”
“She OK?”
“The last I heard she was fine. She wasn’t completely out like you. A little concussed, though. And very badly shaken.”
“Everyone else?”
“Few scrapes, cuts. A story to bore the grandkids with.”
“So I was the worst?”
“You took the prize.”
“What hit us?”
“Rocket-propelled grenade. Got the Land Rover above the wheelbase, knocked us over on one side.”
“Who did it?”
“Who knows?”
“Any chance of catching them?”
“I doubt it.”
“You or I hit anyone?”
“Nope.”
“Did they at least leave the grenade launcher? Get prints off it?”
“They took it with them. Go home, Sean.”
“I think I will.”
Home to Coronation Road with a splitting headache.
Aspirin and gin. Valium and codeine.
I called Sara but she was busy and couldn’t come over.
I made a vodka gimlet and put on the news. There had been half a dozen riots in Belfast that day. Twelve hijackings. Nineteen separate attacks on police officers. The attack on our Land Rover didn’t even merit a passing mention.
The next day Lawson, McArthur, Crabbie, and myself went to see Fletcher in the Royal Victoria Hospital. She was sitting up in bed. Her fiancé, Ted, was with her. He was a building contractor from Omagh. Big guy, moustache, ruddy cheeks, red hair. He was wearing Wellington boots with corduroys and a checked sports coat, which was the look of an older man although Teddy was only about twenty-five.
We introduced ourselves, asked how the patient was doing.
The patient was on the mend. A sprained wrist, a mild concussion, two stitches on her upper lip.
Gun Street Girl Page 9