I gave the man a wink and his lip curled in distaste. He didn’t like my new-found pantomime joviality. She, however, smiled. “You bring several things, Sean. First, you’re very good at what you do. Second, we don’t want the man we’re looking for to know that we’re making a special effort to find him; of course, he knows that the police are after him, but if two people like Tom and myself were to go around asking questions . . . Well, that just might set the alarm bells ringing a bit louder than we’d like. And third and most important of all, the personal. You actually know the individual that we’re seeking.”
“You went to school with him,” Tom added.
I digested this information. Part two was a half-truth. She and Tom wouldn’t be going around asking questions—they’d have proxies in the RUC or Special Branch to do that. But MI5 were like those English officials in the Raj who could never completely trust their sepoy soldiers. The RUC was leaky and unreliable, whereas I was safely outside the system. I would be grateful to have a job. Grateful and pliant.
I sipped some more tea, had another biscuit, and lit a cigarette. Of course, it was obvious who they were talking about: I had only been to school with one man that MI5 could possibly be interested in and that man was Dermot McCann.
“Mr. Duffy, if I could just suggest a—” Kate began, but I cut her off.
“You see, the thing is, love, I’ve retired. I’d like to help you but you’ve arrived too late. I’m putting the house on the market, I’m selling up, and I’m moving to Spain. I’ve picked out a nice wee spot with a view of the Med and with my RUC pension coming in every month I’ll be sitting pretty.”
“What will you do with your time?” Tom asked.
“Nothing. Relax. Listen to music. Did you know that Haydn wrote one hundred and four symphonies? Who’s heard more than half a dozen of them?”
Kate bit her lip and looked at me benevolently. “Look, Sean, we deeply regret the way you have been treated in the last year.”
“Who’s we?”
“We work for the Security Service, as you intuited,” Kate said.
I was excited now but I let my anger bubble through: “It’s easy to say that you deeply regret it but you didn’t actually lift a finger to help me, did you?”
“It wasn’t our purview,” Kate said.
“Or maybe you caused the whole thing, eh? Maybe you’ve done it to get me on the way down and then you chaps swoop in as my saviors from across the sea? If that’s the case, I’m afraid its backfired pretty fucking spectacularly. I’ve moved on. I’ve moved on mentally and spiritually and very soon I’ll have moved on geographically too. I’m done with Northern Ireland and the Troubles and Thatcher and MI5 and this whole disagreeable decade. I’m very happy to take my wee bit of hard-earned scratch and go to Spain,” I said.
Tom looked concerned but after a moment’s thought Kate shook her head.
“I don’t think so,” she said.
I set my teacup on the mantel, stubbed out the cigarette in the dolphin ashtray, and rubbed my chin.
“No, believe me, I’m leaving. I’m like Macavity the fucking Mystery Cat. I’m not here. I’m already gone.”
Kate sighed, waiting for the histrionics to be done with.
I slipped in the dagger. “And if you want me to locate Dermot McCann for you before I go it’s going to come at a very high price.”
Tom was shocked to hear the name Dermot McCann so early in the conversation but Kate merely arched an eyebrow.
“What price?” she asked.
And now we had the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What the hell did I want?
“Full reinstatement to the rank of detective inspector. Full remission of pay and seniority. My record to be expunged of any wrongdoing. A posting to a police station of my choosing. And something else . . .”
“What?” Kate asked.
“An apology for the way I’ve been treated. An apology from the top.”
“The Chief Constable?”
“From Thatcher.”
“From Mrs. Thatcher?” Tom asked, amazed at my chutzpah.
“Well, not from fucking Denis.”
“You must be out of your mind, chum!” Tom exclaimed, his eyes bulging in his head.
“That’s what I want. Take it or fucking leave it.”
“You know we could make things very unpleasant for you,” Tom said.
I got to my feet and got close to him. Practically nose to nose. “No, mate, you don’t want to be starting in with the threats, that’s the wrong tack completely,” I said.
Kate cleared her throat, stood, and brushed imaginary crumbs from her blouse.
“I assume a letter of regret signed by the prime minister would be sufficient?” she asked in a business-like voice.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Well, we’ll have to see what we can do, then, won’t we?” she said.
She waved Tom to his feet.
I saw them to the front door. “We’ll be in touch,” Kate said.
“You better make it soon, love, I hear Valencia is lovely this time of year.”
“Actually, it’s surprisingly inclement,” she said, and walked briskly down the garden path.
Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow’s wing, under the crow’s wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit country of South Armagh. The music in my head was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which opens with a hesitant syncopated motif evocative of Mahler’s irregular heartbeat . . .
I’d never liked helicopters: hills looming out of the fog/engine failures/surface-to-air missiles—especially the latter. RAF choppers in Ulster flew with magnesium-flare countermeasures streaming constantly from the back of the aircraft, but for bureaucratic reasons the army had not yet adopted this sensible precaution. Fortunately the flight from Belfast was short and I could soon see our destination.
Bessbrook Army Barracks had grown up around a converted mill built by Quakers in the nineteenth century. It was now the regional headquarters of the British Army in Armagh and the busiest heliport in Europe. Hundreds of soldiers were ferried from here all over the border region and it was here that many of the intelligence agencies and the military police had their command centers.
Within the coils of razor wire and blast-proof perimeter walls there were squaddies of every stripe: infantrymen, chopper pilots, SAS, engineers, signals, Royal Marines, you name it. Bessbrook was a bundling of all the British Army’s best assets in one basket. It was surrounded on all sides by unfriendlies, and if the IRA ever got its shit together for a big push Bessbrook would make a nice little Dien Bien Phu.
We dropped to five hundred feet. Everywhere arc lights, spotlights, red flares. The town of Newry just two klicks to the left; the border to the Irish Republic only a stone’s throw to the right in a patch of forbidding darkness.
“Brace yourself! We do a hard landing. You get out, we take off,” the gunner explained.
“What do you mean by hard landing?” I asked, but by this stage we were in a rapid descent. The Wessex touched down on a huge white H.
“This is you! Get out!” the gunner yelled.
I nodded, undid my harness, and took off my headphones. I ran out of the chopper and as soon I was safely out of the way the Wessex took off again.
A young military policeman with a clipboard walked toward me.
“Inspector Duffy?”
Inspector?
“I’m Duffy.”
“This way.”
We went through a metal blast door and I followed him deep into the concrete labyrinth. We had gone two levels down and through several different security zones when we reached the lowest level of all: a dank, grim sub-basement.
“It’s like Hitler’s last days down here.”
The MP had clearly heard that one before but he smiled anyway.
I was taken to an interview room and left with a jug of water, a ch
air, an ashtray, and the Daily Mirror. I read the Mirror and smoked a tab.
The headline was about magician/comedian Tommy Cooper, who’d had a heart attack the previous night and died live on TV. Everyone thought it was part of his act and continued laughing while he struggled for breath on the stage floor. “It was the way he would have wanted to go,” many of Cooper’s friends were quoted as saying, but you couldn’t really believe that.
Tom and Kate entered ten minutes later. Tom was wearing a black polo-neck sweater over a pair of brown slacks and brown tasseled loafers. He was trying hard to be casual but there were bags under his eyes and his face was ashy. Kate was wearing a white shirt and faded blue jeans. Tom was carrying a tape recorder, she a briefcase. He set up the tape recorder, hooked it to a microphone, and pressed record.
“8:01 p.m., 16 April 1984, Bessbrook, County Armagh, Northern Ireland. Interview with Sean Duffy, formerly of the Royal Ulster Constabulary,” he said.
“Still formerly, eh?”
Kate opened her briefcase and passed me a sheet of paper. It was a legal document temporarily reinstating me into the RUC until December 31, 1984, with the rank of detective inspector.
I looked at it and then at her. She could tell that I wasn’t pleased.
“What’s this 31 December bullshit?”
“I’m afraid it was the best we could squeeze out of the Chief Constable,” Kate replied.
“He really doesn’t like you,” Tom added.
“Where’s my letter from Thatcher?”
“The prime minister was apprised of your request and declined to sign a letter of apology or regret at your allegedly unfair treatment by Her Majesty’s government,” Kate said with an attempt at a sympathetic smile.
“Did you even ask?”
“Yes, we did ask.”
“That sour old bitch!”
I looked at her and at Tom and at the black tape spinning round on the recorder.
“Sean,” Kate said softly. There was something odd about her face, something difficult to explain. Under that severe brown bob she was attractive and intelligent, but you couldn’t tell what she was thinking or where she was from or even how old she really was—I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she was twenty-two and fresh out of Oxford or fifty and a long-standing veteran of the Cold War.
“This is the best we can do, for now,” she continued.
“It’s not good enough. I want full reinstatement and an apology. Those goons called me a “Fenian bastard,” practically to my face. Do you have any idea what it’s been like putting up with bollocks like that over the years?”
Of course they didn’t. Not really. Their religious wars were done. The English had got over all this hundreds of years ago.
Tom drummed his fingers on the table.
I looked up at the ceiling. What was I going to do? Go to bloody Spain? Eat tapas and listen to frigging flamenco?
“I’m willing to drop my demand for a letter of apology but I’m not going to compromise on anything else,” I said.
Tom shook his head at Kate, as if saying, I told you so, he’s a fucking prima donna.
“Sean, look, this is the best deal we were able to get. A temporary reinstatement, a return to the CID. Your old rank back! It took a lot of haggling to get just this through the RUC hierarchy.”
“It’s worthless. All this means is that come 31 December I’ll be chucked out again on my ear,” I said, waving the paper like a sadder and wiser Neville Chamberlain.
“No, that’s not the case,” Kate insisted.
“So what does it mean?”
“It means that you’ll be temporarily reinstated with a proviso that at the end of the year the reinstatement will be made permanent . . . if certain conditions are met.”
“And what are those conditions?”
“That you do no harm to the reputation of the RUC, that you don’t violate any direct orders from senior RUC officers, and, finally, that MI5 gives the Chief Constable a favorable report on your activities with this service.”
I wrinkled my nose in disgust. “So I’m back on probation and effectively I’ll be serving two masters. Trying to keep the cops happy and MI5 happy at the same time?”
“I suppose so,” Kate said.
But restoration to the police? To my former rank? To be a detective again? The old thrill was coming back . . .
“I’d like to see all this in writing.”
“Don’t push it, Duffy,” Tom muttered.
I leaned back in the plastic chair, looking at poor Tommy Cooper’s grinning face under his red fez.
“What are you thinking, Sean?” Kate asked.
“Albion perfide is what I’m thinking.”
“Yes. You’re right to be cautious of the service but wrong to distrust me. I make it a point of giving my word only when I know I can keep it.”
“Oh, you’re good,” I told her, but in truth her words were strangely reassuring.
“And if you really want me to, I can write you a note explaining the conditions and provisos of your full reinstatement,” Kate added with a smile.
I nodded.
“Well then,” she said, opened her briefcase and passed me several forms to read and sign. There was no drama. We all knew what I was going to do.
I put my signature to two different versions of the Official Secrets Act and a form indemnifying the Home Office from death or injury that might happen in the line of duty. When I was done Kate carefully took the forms and put them back in her briefcase.
“Jolly good. Now, you must understand that what we’re about to tell you is highly confidential . . .” Kate began.
“OK.”
She cleared her throat. “All right, then . . . We’ve known for a few years that the IRA has been receiving weapons training in Libya. Following the mass break-out from the Maze prison last September we were able to track nine or possibly ten IRA escapees to Tripoli. Through the work of our sister agency we have been able to identify most of those individuals, one of whom, as you correctly guessed, is Dermot McCann.”
“He’s quite the lad, isn’t he? You really should have kept a better eye on him.”
“Indeed. Now, relations between Colonel Gaddafi and the IRA have been somewhat complicated, fraught, one could even say, and in the late autumn of last year our sister service managed to plant a story with the Gaddafi regime that the IRA men were in fact agents of the Mossad. Gaddafi had all of them arrested and thrown in one of his dungeons.”
“Nice work.”
She shook her head. “As is typical of the somewhat baroque schemes of the SIS this disinformation created only a short-term gain and may actually have hurt our cause. Gaddafi has since released all of the IRA personnel and has redoubled his efforts to equip and school them.”
Tom took up the story: “SIS did do us one favor, though. They were able to get a copy of McCann’s prison journal. Unfortunately it’s not terribly helpful, but we’d still like you to read it.”
He passed me two dozen photocopied pages in a black binder. I flipped it open and saw it contained doodles, political commentary, drawings, poems, and a potted attempt at an autobiography.
“You’ve read this already?” I asked.
“Yes, and I’m afraid that McCann was not foolish enough to write anything incriminating.”
“Do you have the original?”
“We do.”
“I’d rather read that, if you don’t mind.”
Kate nodded and Tom passed me a little notebook covered with candle wax and which smelled of sand and sweat and ful medames.
“What else have you got on Dermot?”
“We’ve been able to gather precious little information about the IRA’s activities in Libya but evidently the men were given bomb-making and weapons training. And we think they were split into two or three separate cells.”
“These cells have the money and operational capability to subsist completely independently of the IRA Army Council when they
return to the British Isles,” Kate continued.
“That must have made you nervous. You’ve got a mole in the IRA Army Council, haven’t you?”
The blood drained from Tom’s face. Kate reached across the table and stopped the tape recorder. “Inspector Duffy, you really shouldn’t speculate about things like that,” she said tersely with an unattractive but oddly fascinating furrow between her eyebrows.
She rewound the tape to the point where she had said “British Isles” and hit the “Record” switch again.
“Last week we received the somewhat alarming information from SIS that the IRA teams were given false passports and some of them may have already departed Libya.”
“Brilliant. So they’re long gone.”
“Yes.”
She folded her hands together on the tabletop and looked at Tom. He had nothing to add.
“Go on,” I said.
“Go on with what?” Kate asked.
“That’s it? You’ve no more intel?”
“I’m afraid that’s it,” Tom said with a sheepish grin.
I lit myself a cigarette and let the nicotine dissolve into my bloodstream for a minute or so before beginning my spiel.
“Let me see if I understand you correctly. Up to ten IRA men have received sophisticated bomb-making and weapons training in Libya. Some of them were escapees from the Maze prison and those boys were already highly skilled explosive engineers. Gaddafi’s secret service has given them false passports, money, and material, and many of them are probably already in the UK plotting a major IRA bombing campaign. Is that about the size of it?”
“That’s about the size of it,” Kate said.
“I think,” Tom began, but before he could tell us these thoughts the lights went off and we heard muffled thumping sounds all around the base. Some sort of attack? If so it was a half-hearted affair and after two minutes the lights came back on again. I noticed that Tom had puffed my cigarette to a stub.
“So what exactly is my role to be in all this?” I asked Kate.
“We’d like you to help locate Dermot McCann for us. He’ll almost certainly be the leader of one of the cells, perhaps of the whole unit.”
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 4