Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  We gave her flowers. Chocolates. A card that showed Snoopy covered with bandages.

  We told her that everyone in the station was asking about her.

  She smiled at the card.

  The kicker came at the end of the obligatory five minutes of small talk.

  Big Ted took Fletcher’s hand and, turning to McArthur, said: “She’s got something she wants to say, don’t you, love?”

  “I do,” Fletcher muttered a little reluctantly.

  “Go on, then,” Ted urged her.

  “Well, it’s like this. I really appreciate everything everyone’s done for me, and to get into the CID was a dream come true, and Sergeant McCrabban has been nothing but kind and patient . . . I mean, I know I’ve had an amazing opportunity here and I don’t want to let the side down or anything, but . . . it’s just that . . . and I don’t want you to think to yourself, oh God, this is what happens when the higher-ups make us take a woman . . . it’s not like that at all. It’s just me, you know?”

  I looked at Crabbie but he was none the wiser either. Was she angling for a transfer already? She’d only been with us a fortnight.

  “I’m sorry, what are you—”

  “She’s resigning. We want to have kids. And how are we going to have kids if she’s getting thrown about in a Land Rover? Look at her face. It’s fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?” Ted said.

  “You’re resigning?” I asked.

  “Yes. But don’t think I’m not really grateful that you would take me on and I might not be resigning completely, you know? Maybe I’ll put in for the part-time reserve. A couple of days a month . . .”

  “You can’t be a detective in the part-time reserve,” I said, annoyed by what she was saying. Sure she’d just had the bejesus scared out of her, but even so, you don’t resign because of a little thing like that.

  “Maybe you should take a couple of days to think things over,” Lawson attempted.

  “I know I should, but—”

  “She’s resigning and that’s the end of it! We’re getting married. We’re settling down and we’re having kids. We don’t need the money and as far as I can see Helen’s done her part now. Done and done,” Teddy insisted.

  On the ride back to the station McArthur wondered whether there was any way we could spin Fletcher’s resignation so it didn’t reflect badly on Carrick RUC. “The higher-ups will criticize us for losing a new recruit who has gone through a lot of expensive training programs. They’ll probably take the huff too and not send us a replacement. Carrick CID will be stuck with an embarrassingly top-heavy department: a detective inspector, a detective sergeant and you, Lawson, the sole detective constable.”

  “Aye, it is a bit silly,” I agreed.

  “And you, Duffy,” he said with an accusatory tone. “You’ll probably be getting out too, won’t ya?”

  “What do you mean, sir?”

  “You’ll see, my lad, you’ll see.”

  10: THE OFFER

  McArthur’s cryptic remark and his mysterious hints over the previous few weeks were clarified the very next day. It was an off day, and it was a good day to have off as there was a big “Ulster Says No” rally planned in Belfast, and the chances were that, if the rain held off, the rally would descend into yet another riot.

  Cornflakes, hot milk, sugar. Coffee. The Open University on BBC 2.

  Out of the Blues: The Best of David Bromberg on the stereo.

  I called Sara at the Belfast Telegraph.

  “Whatcha doing?”

  “Working. You?”

  “My off day. Wanna do something?”

  “I can’t. Working. Working all the time now.”

  “It’s an ill wind . . .”

  “Exactly. Any developments on our case?”

  “Our case?”

  “Michael Kelly.”

  “Oh, no. I think it’s done and done that one.”

  Awkward silence.

  “I got a dog,” she said. “Temporarily. My sister’s actually. Her husband’s allergic.”

  “Is that so?”

  “A poodle.”

  “Do you want to do something tonight?”

  “I really can’t.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “I’ll call you, Sean.”

  “OK.”

  I hung up the phone. Looked at it. Sipped my coffee.

  A knock at the front door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Would your honor be home at all?”

  I opened the door. It was a tramp. I listened to his story. He just needed some money to catch the boat train. He had a job in Scotland on the oil rigs, had a wife and child, and he would pay me back as soon as he got to Aberdeen. It was compelling fiction, and he was going great guns until he strayed into weirdo territory and started talking about the Book of Revelation.

  I gave him a quid to get rid of him.

  Back to the kitchen.

  Bromberg. Cocaine. Cornflakes.

  Another knock at the door.

  “You’re not getting any more money!” I yelled from the kitchen.

  “We don’t want any money. We want to talk to you,” a woman’s voice replied.

  I retrieved my service revolver from the kitchen counter, decided against it, got my new Glock from the hall cupboard, and went outside into the back garden. I opened the back gate and went down the entry between the houses on the terrace. From the mouth of this shared entryway I had an excellent view of my front door. I saw who it was and put the nine-millimeter back in my dressing-gown pocket.

  “Hello, Kate,” I said.

  “Hello, Sean,” she said.

  Kate hadn’t changed a lot in the year and a half since I’d seen her last. She was still attractive, thin, weather beaten. Definitely no grey in her hair, but perhaps she no longer looked quite so youthful. Aloof and beautiful in a mannish, austere kind of way. Her blonde hair was a little lighter, her face had no trace of a tan. No holidays in the sun for Kate Albright, the MI5 head of station in Belfast.

  She was wearing brown trousers over boots, a white Aran sweater over a T-shirt. She had no coat and she wasn’t that wet, so there must be a car and a—

  Yeah, there it was. A silver Jag with a driver wearing sunglasses. And someone in the back seat also wearing sunglasses, sitting there like an eejit.

  Not another shiny Jag like that in all of Victoria Estate. Subtle. MI5 all over.

  “Were you in a fight, Sean?”

  “A fight? What? No. Land Rover rolled over. Just one of those things. Do you want to come in?” I asked.

  “I’d love to.”

  “You’ll have to come round the back, didn’t bring a front door key.”

  “But you did bring a gun, I see.”

  I nudged the Glock handle back into my dressing-gown pocket. “Well, you never know who it might be.”

  “Would you mind if I invited Miss Kendrick to join us?”

  “More the merrier. I’ll go round the back and let you both in.”

  Back door. Kitchen. Kettle on. Through the hall. Front door.

  Kendrick was a plump redhead with a frumpy peasant quality to her that no doubt endeared her to Kate. Thin lips, blue dress, sensible shoes.

  “Tea, coffee, something a little stronger? Sixteen-year-old Ardbeg just waiting for an occasion.”

  “A little early for that. Coffee would be fine,” Kate said.

  “Coffee’s fine,” Kendrick agreed.

  “Have a seat. I’ll bring it.”

  I showed Kendrick to the chair by the fire so I could steal a look at both of them in the angle of the hall mirror.

  Kate Albright. Kate fucking Albright, who had caused me much grief over the last couple of years. She’d pushed me to go to America to investigate a murder, and when that had blown up in my face and I’d been demoted, she’d promised to help me resurrect my career if I found my old school friend and IRA mastermind Dermot McCann.

  I’d killed Dermot for her. In return I’d got my old job back. This
job. This fucking shitty job.

  For Dermot, too, an idealist, a dreamer, a poet—a fucking sociopath, yeah, but still, those other things as well . . .

  Kendrick I’d never seen before. She had a clutch bag long enough to hold a silenced nine-millimeter pistol. She was not someone you’d suspect of wet work, which was perfect if you wanted her to do wet work. On me? Sure, why not. I knew a lot, I was a drinker, I was morose and unpredictable . . . Why not silence me and end a potentially embarrassing complication—I was just a dumb Paddy after all, wasn’t I? A Fenian Paddy at that . . .

  This would be the moment to come in and whack me, with my back turned, as the kettle boiled.

  Death, judgment, heaven and hell. Bean grinder, French press, where’s the Hobnobs?

  “What are you listening to?” Kate asked as I brought in the coffee and biscuits and the possibly dodgy milk.

  “The best of David Bromberg,” I said shamefacedly. Shamefacedly, of course, because compilation albums are always slightly embarrassing to the serious record collector. Legend: The Best of Bob Marley and The Beatles 1967–1970 were piled high in every record shop in the land, but I wouldn’t be seen dead exiting HMV with either of those.

  “I see,” she said.

  She pulled the ashtray toward her and lit up a Silk Cut—that was new, she hadn’t been a smoker before.

  “Stress getting to you?” I asked.

  “We all need our little vices.”

  Aye, we do. In the last fourteen hours I’d had tea, coffee, pharma cocaine, hashish, tobacco, codeine, whiskey, bourbon, beer, and as a sleep aid: Valium and vodka and lime. Nice combo if you could swing it all. Could I swing it? Well, I was still standing, wasn’t I?

  Ms. Kendrick helped herself to a coffee and Hobnob.

  Kate stubbed out her cigarette and grabbed a cup of joe.

  “So, ladies, what brings you to sunny Carrickfergus?” I asked, adjusting the fold of my dressing gown so I didn’t accidentally expose myself. “Am I in some kind of trouble?”

  Kate took a sip of coffee and cleared her throat. “No, Sean, no trouble, quite the reverse.”

  “Oh?”

  “We were wondering if you were quite happy with the way your career is panning out in the RUC?”

  “Because . . .”

  “We . . . I . . . would like to offer you a job.”

  Now there’s a phrase to send chills down your spine.

  “In MI5?”

  “In the Security Service, yes.”

  “Quit the police and join MI5?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I do that, Kate?”

  “For several reasons. I don’t know if you’ve seen your personnel file at the RUC . . .”

  “I’ve seen my file. Been through it with HR many times.”

  “Ah, yes, there’s the file HR shows you and then there’s the other file, isn’t there?” she said.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, for a start there’s a promotion hold on you, Sean. I had to pull every string I could to get you bumped back up to inspector, but that’s as far as you’re ever going to go.”

  “Why? I’m good at my job. Better than most.”

  “They just don’t like you, Sean. They feel that you bit the hand that fed, that you’re a loose cannon, that you’re more trouble than you’re worth. You were being groomed for the top, for the very top, and they feel that you put your individual caseload ahead of your loyalty to the RUC.”

  I nodded. It wasn’t an unfair assessment. I’d disobeyed orders by continuing an investigation into a supposed gay serial killer when the case had been taken from me and given to Special Branch. And then there was the trip to America where I’d really fucked up by making a deal with the FBI to ignore everything connected with John DeLorean, and then, idiotically, getting myself mixed up in the DeLorean case again within days of returning home.

  “So I’ll be a lowly detective inspector for the rest of my days; that’s not such a bad life. Columbo has been stuck at lieutenant for the last fifteen years . . .”

  “We believe that keeping you as a junior detective is not a good use of your talents and abilities. You’re still young, Sean. We believe that you have potential to really make a difference in the Province over the next five or ten years as the Troubles begin to wind down.”

  “Wind down? I don’t see any evidence of anything winding down.”

  “That’s because you don’t know what we know,” Kendrick said.

  I raised an eyebrow. “What do you know?”

  “And of course your pay would rise substantially. With your years in, you’d be beginning at Civil Service Grade 5 with the usual Northern Ireland allowances,” Kate said. “Which could mean up to an extra ten thousand pounds a year . . . You could move out of this . . . house.”

  “I like it here,” I said quickly, trying to conceal my surprise. An extra ten grand a year? Shit. I’d be bringing in serious money. I could buy a cottage in Donegal. I could go to America a couple of times a year . . . if I could make it through US Customs and Immigration.

  “We might require you to move, Mr. Duffy, but there would also be a moving allowance,” Kendrick said.

  “We’d quite like you in a house where they don’t paint swastikas on your front door,” Kate said.

  “Ah, you saw that? That was just kids, no big deal; they took it off when I asked them to,” I said, feeling oddly defensive about Coronation Road and its occupants.

  Kate sipped her tea and said nothing.

  “What would my job be, exactly? An analyst? That sort of thing?” I asked.

  “We’ve got a lot of analysts, but we don’t have experienced field men. We need agent handlers.”

  “I’d be running informers?” I said with distaste.

  “You don’t like informers?” Kate asked.

  “Who does?”

  “We do. We like them very much.”

  “The ones I’ve met have been the scum of the earth,” I said, which was a high-horse line and she knew it—the RUC would grind to a halt without paid informers and the Confidential Telephone.

  “Would it surprise you to learn that one in four IRA volunteers now works for us in some capacity?” Kate said, deadpan.

  “One in four! You’re joking!”

  “One in four. Actually in terms of percentages it’s around twenty-seven per cent.”

  “A quarter of the IRA are actually British agents? Bollocks!” I said, utterly shocked.

  “It’s true,” Kendrick said. “One in four IRA volunteers work for us in some capacity as fully paid informers, as petty touts, or occasionally as active agents.”

  I was struggling to take this in. “But, but . . . but if that’s true, why haven’t you shut them down completely?”

  “The cell structure,” Kendrick explained.

  “Some commands have entirely resisted infiltration. The South Armagh Brigade, for example. The sleeper cells in England and Germany. And there’s also the fact that we’re playing the long game with many of these agents and informers. Letting them rise as far as they can . . .”

  “So you let them commit the odd murder here and there so they can prove their bona fides and move up the ranks?” I said with disgust.

  “If it’s any comfort, Sean, our guidelines, though flexible, don’t usually permit us to sanction mass atrocities. Usually our sins are ones of omission,” Kate said.

  “I don’t know what that means. And I don’t want to know.”

  Kate could see that she was losing me. “What you do in the police is, of course, very valuable. You can pick up the odd enforcer or murderer or extortionist. But what we do . . . what we are doing is damaging entire networks. We are working at ending this insurgency from within.”

  “By placing your men at the top of the terrorist organizations?”

  “And women. Let’s not be all 1970s about this,” Kendrick said.

  “We need experienced, competent agent handlers, people who know Northern Ireland. P
eople who understand the nuances. People who are smart.”

  “I’m not as smart as you think.”

  “We think you are, Sean. We think you’ve got a great career ahead of you if you are with the right people. The RUC believes that you’re not worth the trouble. The RUC would love you to stay in a backwater and keep your head down and make no waves until you’re finally killed, or invalided out, or take early retirement. We like the fact that you have ambition; we like the fact that you’re willing to take chances. I’ve seen your work, Sean. I’ve seen what you can do. Your skill with people, your insight. Even just by living here—a Catholic policeman on Coronation Road in Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus—you’re demonstrating that you walk where others cannot. You’ve made mistakes, of course, but I’m willing to overlook those mistakes. I appreciate and understand you in a way that your bosses in the RUC do not.”

  “All this love’s making my head spin.”

  “Let it spin.”

  “But the fact remains, I’ve put in ten years and—”

  “Don’t say no. Not now. Mull it over. Consider everything I’ve said. Think about the way you’ve been treated. Think about what we could do for you. We’d let you finish that PhD of yours. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”

  I hadn’t thought about my aborted PhD in years.

  “We value your intellect. You wouldn’t have to hide it.”

  “You have a very low opinion of the RUC,” I said.

  Kate shrugged and said nothing. She saw that no good would come of her piling on.

  “Think about the difference you could make if you came to work for us,” she said.

  “Well, it’s certainly food for thought,” I said.

  Kate stood. Kendrick got up too.

  I saw them to the door.

  Kendrick went to get the car started. Kate held my gaze.

  “We need you, Sean. And we need fifty more like you.”

  “I don’t really have the mind-set of a civil servant, Kate.”

  “To be honest, I don’t think you have the mind-set of a policeman.”

  “Fair point.”

  “You’ll consider it?”

  I nodded.

  She walked down the path.

  Turned.

  “Oh, and Sean?” she said in a half-whisper.

  “Yeah?”

  “Your house stinks of marijuana and Scotch, and there’s what appears to be cocaine on the lapel of your dressing gown. Even if you don’t join us, you could do with getting your act together, yes?”