Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  “Blown how?”

  “She told her ma where she was staying, so her ma could forward all her Christmas presents to her.”

  “Where is she staying again?”

  “Some flat in Ayr, just south of Glasgow.”

  “She gave her ma that address?”

  “Aye, and her ma’s told all her friends and relations where to send the presents too. Strathclyde Police are having kittens. They think some goon’s gonna come over and murder her.”

  “Yeah, it’s OK to move her, then. We’ll pay for it. I’ll find the money somehow.”

  “Thanks, Sean, I’ll give them the go-ahead.”

  “And tell them to keep that wee doll away from the telephone.”

  Sara called me into the kitchen, handed me a can of Bass and a dish of casserole, which I had to admit looked pretty good.

  “What’s the matter, Sean? I heard you on the phone. Bad news?”

  I told her about Deirdre Ferris’s big mouth.

  “Strathclyde Police think that someone’s going to come over from Belfast and murder her.”

  “Why wouldn’t they come over and murder her?” Sara said.

  “Well, she might not even be telling the truth about seeing someone outside her flat that night.”

  “But if she is telling the truth and she’s just blabbed the location of her safe house, why wouldn’t the killer come over and clean up that loose end? He’s ruthless. He killed Sylvie. He killed Michael and his parents. What’s one more murder to him?”

  I put down the can of Bass. “You might have something here. We get Deirdre to a different safe house, then we stake out the old safe house to see if anyone shows up.”

  “And I get the story if you catch the killer!”

  I called Crabbie back and ran the scapegoat idea past him. He liked it. I ran the Ayr trip past the Chief Inspector and he didn’t give a damn what we did as long as it didn’t involve the higher-ups and was within our budget.

  I phoned Lawson. “Stranraer ferry tomorrow morning. Six a.m. boat. Be there for five thirty. Don’t be late.”

  “What?”

  “Be at Larne harbor for five thirty, pack a change of clothes, don’t be late.”

  Larne to Stranraer on the ferry.

  Alone on the freezing stern deck smoking grass, looking back at the County Antrim coast in the pre-dawn light.

  Crabbie inside eating egg and sausages, Lawson sitting next to Crabbie looking peaky.

  Arrival at the unpretentious Scottish port of Stranraer.

  We drove the Beemer off the boat and up the really quite lovely A719 to Ayr. DI Cyril Bullock from the local CID met us at Ayr police station. A chubby, curly-haired, wee character with glasses and an elbow-patched, corduroy jacket that made him seem like the new maths teacher. He told us that Deirdre was gone, rushed away in the middle of the night for her own safety.

  “She’s to be allowed no access to the telephone. For all intents and purposes she’s still here,” I explained to Bullock.

  “Aye. That makes sense,” he agreed.

  We set up the stake-out between us. Bullock reckoned that the three of us and a rotating team of four Strathclyde CID officers would be sufficient for the job. A bigger team would have been better, but Ayr was a small cop shop and we didn’t want to overburden them for what would probably amount to nothing.

  “How long do ye think we’ll have to do this?” Bullock asked.

  I shrugged and looked at McCrabban.

  “A week?” he suggested.

  “A week tops; we can’t really afford the man hours for longer.”

  We followed Bullock to the safe house, which actually was a rather nice flat overlooking the water, the strand, and Goat Fell on the Isle of Arran.

  We staggered the watches between the two forces.

  Two men outside the flat, two inside at all times.

  First night stake-out—zilch.

  In the morning we found a little café on the seafront which did the full Scottish breakfast, which consisted of bacon, eggs, pancakes, toast, black pudding, white pudding, and haggis.

  Washed down the breakfast with oily coffee and smokes.

  Downtime walking around Ayr. Crabbie found a Presbyterian church where John Knox had given a sermon. We all made our way sooner or later to the Robbie Burns Cottage. I ran my fingers along Burns’s thatching and a passing lady motorist stopped her car, wound down her window, and said, “Please don’t touch the thatching,” in Maggie Smith’s Jean Brodie voice.

  The sun setting over the Firth of Clyde.

  Darkness.

  Shifts again. Strathclyde CID outside in a patrol car. Carrick RUC inside the flat.

  Midnight came and went. I let Lawson get a kip. Crabbie was up reading the New Testament. I lay on the living-room sofa reading Philip Larkin’s essay on Django Reinhardt.

  In a way it is the jazzman who, in this century, has lived the life of the artist. At a time when the established arts are generally accepted and subsidized with unenthusiastic reverence, he has to suffer from prejudice or neglect to get the unique emotional language of our age recognized. And he has been able to do this by the intensity of his devotion to the art. It is hard to think of the career of say Bix Beiderbecke or Charlie Parker without sensing something of the emotion of Wordsworth’s “We poets in our youth began in gladness/But thereof come in the end despondency and madness.”

  I put down the book. Father McGuire, that melancholy Cumbrian sadist, had beaten more stanzas of Wordsworth into my slender frame than I cared to think about. I was certain that the line in Wordsworth actually read “We poets in our youth begin in gladness.”

  I was about to ask the Crabman whether he knew any Wordsworth when the radio crackled into life.

  “Duffy, there’s someone coming up to the fourth floor that we don’t recognize from the building. Big lad, jeans. Parka,” Bullock said.

  Crabbie put down his Bible.

  I went to the bedroom and woke up Lawson.

  “Wassa—”

  I put my hand over his mouth.

  “Ssshhh. Someone coming.”

  I tiptoed across the flat to the bedroom.

  “Keep the lights off,” I whispered to Crabbie.

  Lawson was nervously holding his revolver.

  “For God’s sake don’t point that thing at us,” Crabbie whispered.

  I advanced carefully across the apartment.

  There was someone right outside the door.

  I put my fingers to my lips and nodded to the lads.

  We heard the jangle of a keychain. Skeleton key, no doubt.

  No voices. No whispers. Solo job.

  A metallic scraping at the lock?

  I had a good view of the door handle in the moon and ambient street light. If it began turning I’d see.

  The radio crackled. “Has he come up yet, Duffy?” Bullock said.

  The scraping noise stopped.

  I turned the radio off but it was too late. I heard running down the corridor.

  I turned the radio back on. “He’s coming back down. Grab him!”

  I opened the flat door but there was no one there. I ran along the hallway and sprinted down the stairs. When I got to the lobby Bullock was standing there looking at me.

  “He didn’t come out this way!” he said.

  “Who’s out the back?” I asked.

  “DC McGrath.”

  We ran out the back. McGrath had been barreled into a metal bin and knocked unconscious.

  “Sean!” McCrabban said. “On the street!”

  I looked to where he was pointing. A figure in a balaclava was sprinting along the Esplanade.

  We drew our sidearms and bolted after him.

  “Stop! Armed police!” I yelled.

  He kept running.

  “Get after him, Lawson!” I screamed at the kid, and he took off like he was on fire.

  “Halt! Police!” Lawson yelled as he gained on the man.

  Balaclava Man darted acros
s Cromwell Road and into a car park.

  Lawson had halved the distance to him.

  “Go on, son!” I yelled.

  The man turned and shot at Lawson twice with a semi-automatic pistol. Lawson dived for cover. The man shot at him again and ran on.

  I pulled out my Glock and fired three rounds at him, but in the dark at that distance I had no chance.

  I reached Lawson. “Are you OK, lad?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He’d twisted an ankle but otherwise was unhurt.

  “Stop! Armed police!” I yelled again and fired three more rounds at the man as he skidded to a halt next to a Porsche 944. He jumped in the passenger-side door and the car screamed off down Montgomerie Terrace.

  I narrowed the angle and almost got level with the car at Arran Terrace.

  The passenger-side window opened and the man shot his entire clip at me. I hit the deck and crawled behind a Volvo 240.

  The big old Volvo was clobbered numerous times. Engine block, door, door, door. Thud, thud, thud, thud. Good grouping. Hell of a shot.

  When I got to my feet the Porsche was a hundred yards away and doing 80 mph.

  Two beats later and it was gone down Montgomerie Terrace to the A719 or the A70, and from there to basically anywhere in Ayrshire. At that speed they could be in Glasgow in twenty minutes, but if they were smart they’d ditch the vehicle as soon as they could and either hijack another, or wait somewhere safe until the manhunt was over.

  As I caught my breath I could hear the Porsche’s throaty 170-horsepower engine tear up the quiet evening air. I heard them hit fifth gear on the manual gearbox and then I heard them no more.

  “I didn’t know you had guns!” a shocked Bullock said to me.

  “Of course we have guns; we’re the RUC,” I said.

  “I dinnae think you’re allowed to bring your guns over here! This is going to cause us a whole mountain of paperwork,” he said, visibly upset.

  “Fuck the paperwork, get on to Traffic and get a fucking roadblock set up sharpish!”

  Bullock notified Traffic. Traffic set up a roadblock on the slip road to the motorway.

  We went to the station to await developments.

  The Porsche was found burned out in East Kilbride two hours later. No sign of the men. No usable forensics.

  “They won’t be back to the flat,” Crabbie said.

  “Nope. We blew it.”

  “Couldn’t be helped, Sean. We did all we could.”

  “Did we?”

  “’Course we did. Try not to be so hard on yourself,” McCrabban said, and patted me on the shoulder, which, for him, was a bold foray into interpersonal contact.

  “All right,” I said.

  “He wasn’t that tall a man,” Lawson said. “Five ten maybe. And he had a partner. So maybe the paramilitaries?”

  “Nevertheless we’ll check the alibis on all our suspects,” I said.

  Unfortunately for us both Nigel Vardon and Tommy Moony were, according to Special Branch, safe at home in their beds. I made them check for us just to be on the safe side. They knocked at the door and woke them both up. John Connolly wasn’t answering his phone and the consulate staff refused to say whether he was still in Ireland or not. Alan Osbourne was home in his London flat.

  Back to Ulster on the ferry. The stink of diesel. The grey water. The boat chugging unenthusiastically into Larne Harbor. Ports are places of beauty and mystery but Larne, as always, was the exception to the rule.

  “I don’t think we’ll even bother going into the station today. The Troubles will continue on their merry way without us,” I informed the men.

  “I could do with a day on the farm,” McCrabban said.

  “Take it. And you could do with getting that ankle looked at, Lawson.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And don’t worry about Scotland. I’ll type up a report for McArthur that will make us all look good.”

  BMW to Coronation Road. A bread van in my parking space. No sign of the owner. I had to park two doors down in front of Bobby Cameron’s place. Sort of thing that would piss him off, so I walked down the path and rang his doorbell.

  He came to the door holding a baby and a tin of Heinz beans.

  “What’s the matter, Duffy?” he asked suspiciously.

  “I’m in your parking spot is all,” I said. “Just wanted to let you know.”

  “What’s wrong with yours?”

  “Bread van’s in it.”

  “Oh. Right. You wanna know why that is?”

  “Does it involve the bread man having a torrid affair with one of the chronically lonely housewives on this street?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then I definitely do not want to know.”

  I said good-bye to Bobby and went home. I kipped for a couple of hours, checked the cinema listings in the Belfast Telegraph, called Sara at work.

  “You wanna go to the flicks tonight?”

  “You finally caught me on a slow day! What’ll we see?”

  “How about When Father Was Away on Business at the QFT?”

  “What’s that about?”

  “It’s about a kid growing up in Yugoslavia after the war.”

  “Yikes! What about Out of Africa? It’s an early screener. Tickets are going round the office; they’re like Gold dust.”

  “Sure. Yeah. Heard good things. Read the book. She’s an interesting character. Starved herself to death. Like Bobby Sands.”

  “What? I don’t think it’s about that. It’s about Africa. Robert Redford’s in it.”

  “I’ll pick you up at six.”

  I shaved, showered, dressed in a suit, checked under the Beemer, and drove to the office. I sat in my office, typed a report on our Ayr adventure, emphasizing the “excellent inter-force cooperation with the Strathclyde Police.”

  After lunch I got back in the Beemer and drove to the Shorts factory in East Belfast.

  I flashed the warrant card and got passed through a couple of low-level flunkies before a very senior manager agreed to see me. I could tell he was a very senior manager because he was from Ballymena and he was wearing a wig. No junior manager could have survived both of those handicaps.

  We shook hands and sat in an empty conference room overlooking the Harbor Airport.

  “So you’re here about the missiles? Are you with Special Branch?” Mr. Williams asked me.

  I explained where I was from and my interest in the case.

  “Has there been any progress in finding out what exactly happened?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid not. We still don’t know who stole them.”

  “But you know that they were stolen? That’s a development, surely?” I said.

  “We’ve known that all along. The inventory thing was a cover story the government made us put out for national security reasons.”

  I was surprised. “Do Special Branch know that?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “They never told us! They were always humming and hawing about it.”

  “I assume it was on a need-to-know basis only.”

  I flipped open my notebook. “So what exactly got nicked?”

  “Six Javelin Mark 1 missile systems.”

  “What’s a missile system?”

  “The missile and the launching mechanism and the radar control.”

  “Bulky?”

  “In its original box, yes. But it could be broken down.”

  “Do a lot of damage with six Javelin missiles?”

  “Yes. But the tech is even more valuable.”

  “How so?”

  “If you got access to the technology you could reverse-engineer it. And with six different rockets to play with you really could get to the guts of the system pretty quickly.”

  “Who’d want to do a thing like that?” I asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine. The South Africans? The Russians? The Iranians?”

  “Would the Americans be involved by any chance?” I
asked.

  “The Americans? Irish Americans? Terrorists, you mean? IRA?”

  “No. The government.”

  “Oh no, I don’t think so. The Americans have their own missile systems that are as good as the Javelin, superior in many ways. There are no intellectual property or proprietary patents that they’d be interested in that I can see.”

  “Special Branch seem to be focusing their attention on Nigel Vardon and Tommy Moony.”

  “That’s who I’d look at.”

  “Why?”

  “Nigel was the manager in charge of security and Moony runs the Transport Union. Nothing moves in here without Moony’s say-so.”

  “Nigel got the sack but Moony’s still in his job.”

  “We can’t sack Moony. The whole plant would come out on strike. Or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “He’s paramilitary, isn’t he?”

  “So they say. Have you heard of a man called John Connolly?”

  “No. The name doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could terrorists in Northern Ireland use these missiles?”

  “I’m sure they could. But that would mean a transaction between the Loyalists and the IRA.”

  “Because it was an inside job?”

  “Exactly! The missiles were almost certainly stolen by workers in this factory who, I’m sorry to say, are overwhelmingly from East Belfast and therefore . . .”

  “Overwhelmingly Protestant and if thus connected to a terrorist group it would have to be a Loyalist one.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Ever seen this guy?” I asked, and handed him the artist’s impression.

  “No, and I wouldn’t want to.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Williams, you’ve been very helpful. You don’t need to tell Special Branch that we had this little chat. They’re ridiculously overprotective about their turf.”

  I drove back to Belfast and called in at the American consulate. I showed my warrant card and asked whether I could possibly see a Mr. John Connolly.

  An extremely pretty red-headed secretary told me to wait.

  She made a phone call, smiled, wrote something on a pad and hung up.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Connolly is unavailable today,” she said in a pleasant Southern accent.

  “Unavailable today? So he’s still in Belfast, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know when he might be available?” I asked.