“Dermot’s been on the run for a while now. Presumably you’ve already tried the conventional approach.”
“Special Branch, the prison service, MI5, and even the SAS have been looking for him,” Kate replied.
“Phone taps? Mail diversion . . .”
“All that and a couple of ground teams.”
“Who exactly are you tapping? I know that Annie divorced him a few years ago.”
“Annie’s living at home with her mother and father, but we’ve tapped that phone anyway just to be on the safe side.”
“Who else?”
“I can assure you that we tap the phones and intercept the post of every known family member and associate.”
“And you’ve heard nothing?” I said.
Tom shook his head.
It was my turn to shrug. “I’m not surprised. Dermot’s extremely disciplined. He’ll never contact his family or friends, not while his cell is operational. Dermot’s no mug. It’ll be a tough gig.”
“We caught him once before,” Tom offered.
“No, you didn’t catch him. The police fitted him up. Dermot would never have left a fingerprint anywhere, certainly not on one of his own bombs. Special Branch planted that print,” I said.
Kate smiled at me. “Perhaps we’ll have to take more extreme measures this time.”
I didn’t like her tone.
“Well, I certainly won’t be your assassin,” I told her coldly.
“We don’t need you to be. We just need you to do what you do best,” she replied.
I lit another fag, threw the match at the ashtray, and it landed on Tommy Cooper’s big chin.
“I’ll need a list of Dermot’s friends, relatives, old prison buddies and acquaintances. Basically every person that you’re wire-tapping and the circle beyond that.“
“We can do some of that.”
“And I’ll need an office. I was thinking Carrick police station. It’s handy and I know the score. They’ve got some tight-arsed new boss there, a chief super from Derry. You’ll have to square it with him.”
“We can do that, too,” she said.
“I’ll need a warrant card that says I’m an inspector in CID. You better stick me in Special Branch. It won’t scare the punters but it sometimes puts the wind up uncooperative peelers.”
I couldn’t think of any more demands off the top of my head.
“That all sounds reasonable,” Kate said.
“Good.”
“Good.”
Kate offered me her hand and I shook it.
Tom walked me to the helicopter landing pad.
On the chopper ride back I read Dermot’s journal: the autobiography, the political theory, the knock-off poetry, a utopian plan for a thirty-two-county, democratic socialist Ireland. If this was the authentic Dermot McCann and not just nonsense he had composed to give his guards something to read, he had become a little embarrassing.
Society is intrinsically dead and Stasis is the defining characteristic of the post-capitalist regime. All consensus in the post textual narrative is used to oppress the sectarian inverse. If one examines the preconceptualist paradigm of Ireland before the Norman Invasion one is faced with a choice: either accept this rural hierarchy or embrace an anarchy of tribal kingdoms. We must build a footbridge to the past and between classes and constructed sectarian identities. And if pretextual rationalism survives the Revolution I do not believe that we will not have to choose between capitalist post dialectic theory and a form of capitalistic Marxism . . .
Pages and pages like that. I looked for acrostics or hidden meanings but didn’t find any. Perhaps it was satire on a high level.
We landed at Carrickfergus UDR base, where a Mercedes was waiting to take me back to Coronation Road. I kept reading in the car. The only really interesting part of the journal was the biographical material: early life in Derry, schooldays, anger at his beatings under the rough hands of the Christian Brothers, 1950s music, radicalization after 1968, protests, prison. Nothing about yours truly. Nothing about our meeting after Bloody Sunday. And nothing of that curious moment in the sixth-form study when he’d slapped me across the face for some slight that I’d inadvertently made.
The car dropped me at 113 Coronation Road.
I went inside and grabbed a can of Bass and sat next to the telephone.
I called my mum and dad and told them I was back on the force with my old rank. My mum started to cry. I started to cry.
I called McCrabban.
“Crabbie, it’s me.”
“Gosh, Sean, I haven’t heard from you in forever. What’s going on? I heard you quit the force?”
“No! Me, quit? Just a rumor. I’m back. Back in CID,” I said, hardly able to contain my pleasure.
“Really? That’s great news!”
“I’m running a case for Special Branch. I was wondering if you’d mind me taking a wee office in Carrick. I know it’s your patch and I don’t want to impose but—”
“Don’t think twice about it! It’ll be great to see you, Sean.”
“Thanks, Crabbie.”
We chewed the fat and I hung up and settled in with the case files on Dermot. Kate had also given me the full MI5 intelligence report on McCann, complete with photographs and a family tree. To my surprise I found that I knew most of it already. Dermot had three brothers and two sisters. One of his brothers was inside doing twenty years for murder, the other two had emigrated to Australia to open a restaurant. His father was deceased and his mother lived with his sisters Orla and Fiona in Derry.
All his surviving relatives were solid Republicans who would never talk.
I finished the Bass, poured myself a whisky, put on the Velvet Underground, and reread everything again.
On the third go through the journal I noticed something that I’d missed the first two times: a tiny doodle of a curly-haired woman that had been scratched out. If you looked carefully through the scribble you could see that the woman was wearing a necklace that had tiny letters on it: “A” scratch, scratch, “I,” “E.”
“Annie,” I said aloud. They were divorced, yes, but perhaps he still carried a torch. My first order of business would be to drive up to Derry and ask his ma and sisters what they knew and then plough the more fertile territory that might be a disgruntled ex-wife . . .
Nico began singing “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” Somehow it seemed totemic. “This case is going to be all about the women,” I prophesied out loud.
Completely correctly, as it turned out.
The man in the mirror: a facsimile of me but scrubbed, shaved, and wearing an ill-fitting white shirt, red tie, and leather jacket. Ill-fitting because I’d lost a lot of weight in the last six months. Easily a stone and a half through a diet of marijuana, ciggies, vodka, lime cordial, and little else. I scuttled down the stairs and stepped quickly out onto the porch. Spring was here in the form of daffodils, bluebells, and a slick street after a shower of rain. The McDowell kids kicked a football in my direction. I hesitantly kicked it back. “Off for a job interview?” Mrs. Campbell asked solicitously from Mrs. McDowell’s porch, where she was enjoying a cigarette.
Thanks to gossipy Sammy McGuinn everyone on Coronation Road knew that I had resigned from the peelers.
“No, no, no! Sure, he’s back in the polis now! The scunners saw the error of their ways and put him back, so they did!” Mrs. McDowell said.
“Is that so?” Mrs. Campbell asked, looking at me for confirmation.
“It is!” Mrs. McDowell insisted between puffs, while nursing a baby at her breast. That was, what, kid number ten for her?
“Are you back in right enough, Mr. Duffy?” Mrs. Campbell asked.
“Well, I—”
“He’s in the Special Branch now! A detective inspector no less,” Mrs. McDowell yelled for all and sundry to hear. That certainly was what it said on my new warrant card, which had been posted to me last week: Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, RUC Special Branch, Assigned to Carrickfergus R
UC. How Karen McDowell knew this I have no idea but her old man did work as a letter carrier for the Royal Mail . . .
Mrs. Campbell’s face glowed with excitement. “Oh, congratulations, Mr. Duffy! I am so happy. I had a feeling that that, uhm, misunderstanding you had with the higher-ups would soon get sorted,” she said.
“Thank you,” I replied and cleared my throat. “Well, I don’t want to be late. First day back and all that.”
“Wait there!” Mrs. Campbell commanded, and ran into her house.
She came back with a comb.
“Bend over the fence there, love.”
“That’s not necessary, I—”
“Bend over the fence!”
I leant over the fence and she combed my hair to get the cowlicks out.
“Ta,” I said sheepishly, and walked to my somewhat battered 1982 BMW E30. I checked underneath it.
“Any bombs today, mister?” one of the McDowell sprogs asked me.
“Not today.”
“Ach,” he said, with mild disgust.
I got inside, tuned the radio to Downtown, and drove to Carrickfergus police station. The guard inspected my warrant card, and with a suspicious shake of the head he let me through.
I parked the car in the small CID section, walked by the potholes filled with rainwater and diesel, and went inside.
At the incident desk there was a fat copper with a silver moustache and skin the color of lard. The old desk sergeant used to do the People’s Friend crossword and have a hard time with it. This guy was halfway through Middlemarch.
“Detective Inspector Duffy reporting for duty,” I announced.
“Aye, you’re expected,” he muttered without looking up.
When I got up to the first floor I saw that there’d been even bigger changes since my last visit. Most of the office walls had been torn down and the space filled with cubicles. CID had been moved from their prime location at the windows overlooking the lough to the drafty cinder-block extension at the back of the building. Apple computers had replaced the typewriters on most desks and the dull yellow light bulbs, which I’m sure had been churning away since the 1930s, had been ripped out and replaced with fluorescent strip lights.
All the old comfortable wooden furniture was gone, replaced by plastic tables and chairs. Many of the coppers were new, young, fresh-faced goons pretending to work at the computers. Some might have been actually working but at what I couldn’t imagine. A couple looked up when I appeared at the top of the stairs but then cast their gaze, down again when they saw that I was not a person of import.
Jazzed-up muzak versions of the great American songbook were piping through a quadrophonic sound system. I suppose the purpose of this was to provide a calming atmosphere, but you could easily imagine a day when someone would crack at the fiftieth iteration of “Mack the Knife” and shoot the speakers off the wall.
I was desperate to see my old CID sparring partners but I knew that the first order of business was to report to Superintendent Carter. He had taken the offices by the window, turning the old evidence room into his new domain.
I knocked on a door that was frosted glass in a black mahogany frame.
“Duffy, is that you?” he said in an impressive psychic display.
“Yes, sir.”
“Don’t stand out there like a bloody eejit, come in!”
He was sitting behind a huge desk also fashioned from a mahogany-like material. He was wearing his superintendent’s uniform and he’d grown long sideburns that gave him a Gilbert and Sullivan air.
“Inspector Duffy reporting for duty, sir,” I said, saluting.
“You don’t salute if you’re in civvies, Duffy. Sit down.”
I sat opposite him. The desk was empty but for a single folder with my name on the top of it. Behind Carter there was a Union Flag and a photograph of the Queen on a horse. There was also a somewhat smaller family portrait of Superintendent Carter, Mrs. Carter, and two grisly youths.
“Let me read you something interesting, Duffy,” Carter said.
“It’s not my horoscope, is it, sir? I don’t believe in that stuff,” I said.
He put down the file and pointed a finger at me. “That’s the kind of attitude that got you sacked in the first place, Duffy. Now, shut up and listen.”
He cleared his throat and he began reading. It was the lowlights of my personnel file and I tuned out for most of it.
“. . . I thought we’d seen the last of you, Duffy. A bad apple everyone around here said. Good riddance, I thought. And I’m home last Sunday, at home, mind you, when I get a phone call telling me that I am to make space for one Detective Inspector Sean Duffy of the Special Branch. This can’t be the same Duffy I’ve been hearing about, says I to myself, but then I find to my amazement that it is. How is it that you were kicked out of the police for a whole host of crimes and misdemeanors, the latest of which was running some poor sod over, and yet here you are? Like magic! Special Branch! An inspector!”
“Well—”
“How did you do it, Duffy? Did you write to Jim’ll Fix It? Is the chief constable your da? You’re not related by blood to any of the crowned heads of Europe?”
“Not to my knowledge, sir.”
“What are you doing, Duffy? And why is it that you’ve come back here? To my parish?”
I looked him coldly between the eyes and was proud that I was now sufficiently mature to avoid the incivility of a smirk. “I’m not at liberty to say, sir,” I said without any inflection.
His face turned red. He put down the piece of paper. A blood vessel pulsed on the left-hand side of his neck.
“It’s like that, is it?”
“Yes, sir, it’s like that.”
“I don’t like it, Duffy. I don’t like it at all.”
“I’m sorry about that, sir, but that’s the way it is . . . I’ve been told that I’ve got an office around here somewhere?”
“Aye, back in CID next to the toilets,” he said with satisfaction.
“All right. Well, I will wish you a good day, sir . . .”
He jumped to his feet, came round the desk, and grabbed me by the arm.
“Who are you working for, Duffy?” he said.
“I can’t say, sir.”
“What’s this all about? Is it about me? Is it something I’ve done, or alleged to have done?”
I sighed. “Will that be all, sir?”
There was a nice beetroot quality to his cheeks now, and to really set a stroke in motion I gave him another uniformed salute, turned on my heel, and marched out.
A jazz trio version of “Last Train to Clarksville” took me across the office to the squalid CID section at the back of the building.
Matty and McCrabban were shoved into a little room with bare cinderblock walls overlooking the car park and the railway lines. The attitude regular cops had toward CID always surprised me. Why the contempt? It was the detectives who actually went around solving the crimes. I mean, who knew what regular cops actually did? I’d been a regular policeman for the last year and I still didn’t know.
I opened the door and went into the CID den.
“Room for one more, lads?” I asked.
The boys were genuinely pleased.
Handshakes, slaps on the back. To put McCrabban at ease I said: “Listen, mate, I’m Special Branch now, a DI on special assignment, I haven’t come to poach, this is still your manor.”
McCrabban was relieved but he tried not to show it. Tall, almost stooped, he had filled out a bit since I’d seen him last but his pale skin was just as pale and there was no trace of grey in his hair.
“Temporarily in charge, Sean. They’re supposed to be bringing in a detective inspector in the summer.”
“They always say things like that. If you hang tight you’ll probably get the job.”
Matty had cropped his hedge hair and there was a bit more color in his cheeks. His beak-like nose and prominent teeth were less to the fore in his still-youthful face. He st
ill didn’t look like a peeler but that was OK because he never really wanted to look like one.
“It’s magic to have you back, Sean, in any capacity,” Matty said.
“I heard they stuck you down in some trench in South Armagh,” Crabbie added.
“Aye, they did. They were doing their best to kill me, I think. But I lived to spite the bastards.”
“You have nine lives, Sean,” Matty said.
“Who wants to sneak out to the pub? My shout.”
“Carter keeps us all on a pretty tight leash,” Matty said.
“Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?”
“You would know,” Crabbie said.
We retired to the Royal Oak next door and the boys filled me in on a year’s worth of office gossip and I told them straight out that I was looking for Dermot McCann and I might need their help at some point.
“You’ve to keep it under your hats, lads. It’s a Special Branch op and those nutters are as paranoid as anything,” I said.
Neither of them, I knew, would breathe a word of it.
We had a quick round of drinks and we ran into my old boss, Chief Inspector Brennan (retired), who’d heard I was back and had come by to say hello. He’d always had a tragic Polonian air about him, but now he was old and shabby and his nose was a metro map of capillaries. And worse than all that he was drunk. Drunk at 1:30 in the p.m. He insisted on standing us all a double Johnnie Walker and he told a few inappropriate stories about me and my insolence in the “bad old days.” Eventually he looked at his watch and muttered something about a golf game.
“There goes the ghost of Christmas future,” Matty said.
Murder, suicide, or cirrhosis—those were three of the most popular ways out of the RUC. The lads were depressed now and I walked them back to the station, requisitioned myself a desk, a chair, a lamp, a phone, and a brand spanking new Apple Macintosh computer.
Satisfied with my day’s work I drove home again.
“How was your first day back, Mr. Duffy? I hear Superintendent Carter is a bit of a hard horse,” Mrs. Campbell asked.
“Well, he’s certainly a—”
She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Mrs. Rattigan says his wife left him for a fancy man over the water. Left the bairns too. Boys, I think.”
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 5