Gun Street Girl

by Adrian McKinty

  “No. Can I take a message?”

  “No message, thank you. You’ve been very helpful. Love your accent. Where in the States are you from?”

  “Little Rock.”

  On principle I like to be as chatty to secretaries and assistants as I can possibly be, but the only thing that came to mind when she said Little Rock was an image of some fat redneck sheriff beating some black kids, so I said nothing, exited the consulate, and took the short walk to the Telegraph offices.

  I was puzzled.

  John Connolly was still “in country.” He hadn’t flown the coop. He was still here. We’d clearly blown him, which meant that he was either sloppy or desperate . . .

  Sara was pleased to see me.

  “You’re a man,” she said.

  “I am,” I agreed.

  “Can I ask you one of the survey questions for the women’s page? It’ll only take a minute.”

  “OK, fire away.”

  “Dogs or cats?”

  “Dogs.”

  “Boxers or briefs?”

  “Marks and Spencer whips.”

  “I’ll write briefs. Panties or knickers?”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “There is no difference. It’s about the word. Which word sounds sexier?”

  “Knickers sounds like something you’d wear in a 1950s’ Carry On film.”

  The survey continued in similar vein.

  We went out to dinner at an adequate Italian place. We saw Out of Africa. It was nothing like the book but Sara loved it. Crying at the end and I knew I was well in. I drove her back to Coronation Road.

  Gin and tonics and in tribute to Philip Larkin: Bix Beiderbecke.

  “That was so sad,” she said.

  “Wasn’t it, though?”

  “It was so sad when he died. She’ll never find love. That was her one true love, wasn’t it?”

  “Redford?”

  “Yes.”

  “In real life he was English.”

  “And did she have VD in real life?”

  “Syphilis. Funny that he didn’t even try to do an English accent. Probably couldn’t do it. Knew Streep would act him off the screen.”

  Sara paused in mid-drink and looked at me. “You’re always nit-picking. Have you ever noticed that?”

  Dodgy situation this. Agree with her. “Yeah, you’re right. It’s not important.”

  “You didn’t even like it, did you?”

  “No. It was good. Beautifully shot and the music was great and she was terrific, and the guy who was the villain in that Bond film was pretty good.”

  Sara had put her glass on the coffee table.

  She wiped the tears from her face.

  “Tell the truth. Did you even like it?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying to me.”

  “What’s the big deal? It’s Out of fucking Africa.”

  “You didn’t like it.”

  “It was fine.”

  “Can you take me home, please?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “I’d like to go home. Will you take me or shall I walk?”

  “Wait here while I go and check under the car for bombs.”

  “Very dramatic.”

  “Very necessary.”

  “I’m sure.”

  I went outside, checked under the Beemer.

  “OK,” I said.

  I drove her home. We didn’t speak. Outside her house I tried to make up. “Look, Sara, I’m really sorry if I—”

  “Oh, Sean,” she said. “It’s not really . . . This isn’t about . . . My life is just so complicated right now.”

  She gave me a kiss on the cheek and got out of the car.

  “Do you want me to walk you to your door?” I asked.

  “No. Thank you . . . Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  I drove down to the castle car park and rolled a joint. I walked to the radar station at the end of the harbor pier to smoke in peace.

  There were no stars. Or wind. Light snow was falling into the calm black sea à la Basho.

  The joint was too loosely rolled and kept going out. I finally tossed it.

  I walked back to the car along the steep-sided harbor wall.

  When I got home Bix Beiderbecke was still playing. Poor sod. Died at twenty-eight of overwork and the booze. Jazz’s “number 1 saint,” Benny Green sarcastically called him. He was good, though, you couldn’t deny that. Good on horn and piano.

  I played “Davenport Blues” three times in a row. Tommy Dorsey on trombone, Don Murray on clarinet.

  Sublime. Fucking sublime. And there was no one else on this street, or in this town, or in this fucking country to share it with.

  “Fuck it,” I said, took the record off and went to bed.

  23: STASIS

  Case conference. No dice with forensics. No dice with eyewitnesses. No dice with tips from the Confidential Telephone or on our artist’s-impression pic or anything else relating to the case.

  This was how all murder cases in Ulster died. No one knew anything. No one would tell you anything. And if forensics couldn’t deliver a hat trick then the only way to bring in your suspect was to fit him up or beat him up.

  But those were the old ways of the RUC. The seventies ways. This was the mid-1980s. This was the brave new world.

  Crabbie was stumped. I was stumped. Even bright young Lawson was stumped. We asked Glasgow CID to show Deirdre Ferris pictures of Nigel Vardon, Alan Osbourne, John Connolly, and Tommy Moony again, but she still insisted that she couldn’t tell whether any of them was the man she claimed to have seen outside her house the night Sylvie was allegedly murdered.

  I called Inspector Spencer at Special Branch, asked about the latest updates. Fanny Adams on the missiles, Shorts still conducting an internal review, SB pursuing every lead but no one was talking and the lines were cold.

  No leads forthcoming there. No leads forthcoming anywhere.

  The three of us sat in the CID incident room looking at one another.

  “Either of you think of anything to do?”

  Lawson shrugged.

  “There’s good money to be made if we volunteer for riot duty,” Crabbie said.

  He was right. The Prods were rioting every night and the cops were getting stretched very thin. It wasn’t just about the Anglo-Irish Agreement now. It was about the future. The Prods could read the demography. The Prods could see the writing on the wall. In November 1985 it was a benign, toothless document called the Anglo-Irish Agreement, but if population trends continued the Prods would become a minority in the six counties and the whole raison d’être for Northern Ireland would cease to exist. Northern Ireland was becoming Algeria, and everyone was worried that Mrs. Thatcher was becoming De Gaulle.

  But riot duty? Not for me. I didn’t need the money or the aggravation.

  Case conference over. Back to my office. Whiskey in the coffee, staring at the lough. Black, sleekit, greasy water; grubby, little boats. The world was mean and damp. The music was Peggy Lee’s Greatest Hits. Leiber and Stoller’s existential classic “Is That All There Is?” on a loop.

  Revolver sitting on desk. Well oiled. Six .38 slugs. Was it ennui that killed all those RUC men who blew their brains out every year? As Peggy Lee warned in the song, death was sure to be just another in a series of great disappointments.

  Knock on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The Crabman. “What if we brought Nigel Vardon in for a formal interview, here at the station. We haven’t done that yet.”

  “We’ll have to clear it with Special Branch.”

  “Aye.”

  I nodded. “All right, let’s go get the arson-surviving, missile-stealing, long-haired fuck.”

  Interview room 2.

  Crabbie and me and the missile-stealing, long-haired fuck. Lawson and DI Spencer observing through the glass. A notebook, a wee jug of water, the tape recorder running precisely as required by the Police and Criminal
Evidence Act (Northern Ireland Order).

  “Mr. Vardon, where were you on the night of November 11, 1985?”

  “I was at home watching TV.”

  “Where were you on the evening of November 12, 1985?”

  “Home watching TV.”

  “Where were you on the night of November 19, 1985?”

  “Ditto.”

  “Who do you think burned your house down, Mr. Vardon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who do you think killed your dogs?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Who killed Michael Kelly?”

  “I heard he topped himself.”

  “Why have you been calling the US consulate?”

  “I got the wrong number. I was trying to call my solicitor.”

  “Do you know a man called John Connolly?”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Did Michael Kelly know John Connolly?”

  “No idea.”

  “The number you called at the US consulate was the number for the guest house where Mr. Connolly is staying.”

  “Like I said, that was a wrong number.”

  Two hours of this. The guy was jumpy, upper lip sweat, dilated pupils. Aye, the guy was a user too. Big time. Try to crack him.

  Three hours.

  Four.

  But it was no good.

  The incident room. Coffee and biscuits. “He knows something, but he is more afraid of them than he is of us,” I said.

  “Afraid of whom?” Lawson wanted to know.

  “Afraid of the Loyalists. Afraid of the men who killed Kelly and his family,” Spencer said.

  “Is that who killed Kelly and his family?” Lawson said.

  Spencer shrugged.

  “So what now?” Crabbie asked.

  “Anybody know any jokes?” Spencer asked.

  “A barman says, ‘We don’t serve time travelers in here.’ A little later a time traveler walks into a bar,” Lawson said.

  “I don’t get it,” Spencer muttered.

  “Lawson, go in there and tell Vardon he’s free to go.”

  Days. Nights. Rain. Bomb scares. Bombs. Riots.

  December. Christmas lights in Carrick. Season of Good Will. Black Santa. Cops taking regular hits from both sides now. Assassination attempts from the Republicans. Death threats and drive-bys from the Prods. Bricks through policemen’s windows. Kids to other kids at school: “Your dad’s a peeler!”

  Sleepless nights. Bad news. Exhausted men at the morning briefings.

  A theft case took me and McCrabban into Belfast. Driving up in the Land Rover to arrest a man called Kevin Banville who’d been the wheelman on a post office robbery. Of course, he’d been tipped off and was long gone. To Manchester, everyone said. Normally neighbors didn’t tell you stuff like that but Kevin was a hated wife-beater. We passed on the tip.

  Time to spare in Belfast.

  “You fancy a run out to East Belfast?”

  “Who lives there?”

  “Moony.”

  Crabbie’s jaundiced eye.

  “Don’t worry, I’ll fix it with the specials.”

  A run over the Lagan to Larkfield Avenue. A red-bricked terrace in solid Prod working-class territory. Curbstones painted red, white, and blue; pictures of King Billy on gable walls.

  Knock on Moony’s door.

  Mrs. Moony standing there large as life and twice as scary. Younger than Tommy by a decade and a half. Five foot two, rollers in hair, gunmetal-grey face tempered by violet eyes à la Liz Taylor.

  “Lord have mercy, I think that it’s the cops,” she said, quoting Van Morrison at us.

  “Mrs. Moony, could we have a word with your—”

  “Tommy, love, it’s the peelers for ya!”

  Tommy’s living room. Crockery in a cupboard. Piano bedecked with pictures of the shipyard and dour men in flat caps. Transport and General Workers’ Union regalia. Another red flag. A picture of Che. Jesus, Tommy knew how to get on my good side: lefty, working-class, union guy, Brummie accent . . . if only he hadn’t done all those murders. If only this family that had immigrated to Belfast to work in the shipyards hadn’t been radicalized by the violence of the early seventies . . .

  If only . . .

  Mrs. Moony bringing tea and biscuits.

  Tommy not well pleased by our presence. “What is the meaning of this? My solicitor has warned you lot before!”

  I waited until the wife had gone before beginning the unpleasantness.

  “Listen, Tommy, we know you did it. Michael Kelly, his parents. Killed that wee girl in cold blood. Had to be you. Only you had the organization. Only you could have sent men to Scotland after Deirdre Ferris.”

  Not a flinch. Not an eye-twitch out of place. Just a sad, silent shake of the head. He took a sip of his tea. “I have been born again in the blood of Christ, Inspector Duffy, something you as a Roman Catholic would never understand.”

  “I wonder how Christ feels about the man who murdered little Sylvie McNichol,” McCrabban said.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “Tell you something you didn’t know. Sylvie’s dad was an alleged police informer. They killed him when she was a wean. Her family got the message. She got the message. She would never have talked. She would never have told us anything. Her death was completely unnecessary,” I added.

  “Are you going to ask me any actual questions, or are you just going to hurl accusations at me, gentlemen?”

  “No one else has to die, Tommy, if the missiles just show up. A tip to the Confidential Telephone, that’s all it would take,” I suggested.

  “I don’t know anything about any bloody missiles!”

  “I’m not asking for a confession, a tip to the Confidential Telephone, that’s all, OK?”

  “I’ve had enough of this. You two must be a couple of Bennies. Now could you please get out of my home?”

  Back outside the house.

  Rain on Larkfield Avenue.

  We got in the BMW.

  “Where to now?” McCrabban asked.

  “Falls Road.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Due diligence, mate. If I’m warning one side I’ve got to warn the other.”

  We drove to the Sinn Fein advice center on the Falls Road. I parked outside and immediately showed my warrant card to the half-dozen concerned security people who were rightly fearful of assassination attempts on the IRA leadership.

  We went inside and I asked to see Gerry Adams.

  “Are you one of his constituents?” a secretary asked.

  “No, but we’ve met a couple of times before. He might remember me,” I said, showing her my police ID.

  Half an hour later Crabbie and I got shown into a crammed little upstairs office stuffed with papers and books overlooking the Falls Road and West Belfast. There were many framed photographs on the wall: Adams meeting Ted Kennedy, Adams meeting Rosa Parks, Adams with Winnie Mandela, Adams with Arafat. You got the message . . .

  Adams came in through a side door dressed in a tweedy jacket and brown cords.

  “Yes, I do remember you, Inspector Duffy,” he said.

  “And this is my coll—” I began, but I saw McCrabban giving me a panicky no names look.

  “And this is my colleague from Carrickfergus CID. We’re investigating the murder of Michael Kelly and his parents in Whitehead. And the subsequent murder of Sylvie McNichol,” I said.

  “What can I do for you?” Adams asked, sitting down behind his desk.

  “I want to warn you about a man called Connolly. An American. He’s here to conduct some kind of arms deal. He’s got a lot of money, but he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s trouble. He is not someone with whom you want to do business.”

  “Me?” Adams said, surprised.

  “Your friends in the IRA. I think they’ve already made the call that Mr. Connolly is a clown, but just to be on the safe side I thought I’d pass on the message.
Special Branch are all over him. He’s bad news.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Adams said.

  “I’ve been to see Tommy Moony and told him too. If you or your friends know anything about any stolen missiles from Shorts they should contact the Confidential Telephone. Four people have been murdered already. No one else has to die because of this.”

  Adams gave the slightest of nods before adding, “I don’t know anything about the IRA or any stolen missiles.”

  I got to my feet. “I think we understand each other, Mr. Adams,” I said.

  “I think we do, Inspector Duffy.”

  Back outside to the Beemer.

  Rain on the Falls Road. Men with guns watching us from many angles.

  “Home?” Crabbie asked nervously.

  “Do you mind if I just pop into the Belfast Telegraph offices first?”

  “What for?” Crabbie asked.

  “See a friend of mine.”

  “Is this your, er, your . . .”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll wait for you at the Crown Bar.”

  The Belfast Telegraph offices were in a prime location on Royal Avenue that got a lot of foot traffic. In the ground-floor office windows they often displayed provocative headlines and photographs. The first edition went to press at one in the afternoon, and if the headlines caught your interest there were newspaper boys outside selling the papers right off the pavement. In other parts of the city the newsies attracted customers by shouting “Teleyo!” and yelling the headline that seemed the most dramatic. The Troubles had been a boon for journalists in what was really a rather dull, provincial city well outside the mainstream of British and Irish culture.

  The Belfast Telegraph offices were buzzing.

  I showed my warrant card to the old-stager security guard at the front desk and asked him where Sara Prentice might be.

  “First floor. News,” he said, looking her up in the directory.

  I went up the steps and saw her immediately, poring over a layout at a huge work desk. She was wearing jeans and gutties with a white blouse. She looked good. Couple of hacks with her. One older, curly hair, beard, checked shirt, brown cloth tie, round glasses—passing resemblance to Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper. The other was her age, skinny, black hair, pale, handsome if you liked thin and Byronic, and these days who didn’t?