“Never as cool as Dermot.”
“Who could be?”
I laughed at that and she smiled at me. I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. She’d always been a looker, Annie. In that dark, Basque, black-Irish way.
She took my hand and held it against her cheek for a moment. Then she caught herself, disengaged my hand, and took a step back.
“Well, Sean, I think you should . . .” she said.
“Yes, I should be going, actually . . .” I said.
I put the key in the lock. Her hand was on my arm. I could see her tear-stained cheeks in the moonlight.
She wanted to say something.
She hesitated.
The seconds went past, falling backward into the abyss with the hours and the years.
“If I asked you to kiss me, Sean Duffy, would you do it?”
“I would.”
“Kiss me, then.”
I kissed her.
My God, I’d waited a long time for this.
I kissed away her tears and my tongue found hers and I pulled her close. She loosened her shirt and grabbed my hand and put it on her breast.
“Quickly! Now! Before I change my mind!” she said, breathlessly.
She unzipped my fly.
“Do you want to go inside or—”
“Make love to me. Fuck me. Fuck me here! Now. Fast!”
I took her up against the car. There was nothing beautiful about it. When she climaxed she screamed loud enough to wake half the colonies of wildfowl on the lough shore. She laughed and I laughed and she kissed me and took a breath and pushed me away. “Go,” she said. “Go on now, you big eejit.”
“Can I see you or—”
“Never! Not with a peeler! Not with you!”
“Then what can we—”
“We can’t! Just go. Just. Fucking. Go.”
I watched her march up to the house and slam the door behind her.
I drove back to Carrickfergus with no music. Just the window down and me fags and the night blowing in. I parked the Beemer on Coronation Road, waded through the bills and junk mail, and went upstairs.
I had a good gander at myself in the bathroom mirror.
Ten years I’d been waiting for that. Was it about Annie? Or was it to get one over on Dermot? Whatever it was it left me feeling foolish, numb. Happy.
“Eejit,” I said to the reflection. I ran the bath and as the room filled with steam my reflection blurred and faded and finally disappeared completely, which was the way I wanted it to be.
In the morning I drove to Antrim and called on Inspector Beggs to ask him about the break-in at the firm of Mulvenna and Wright where Lizzie had interned.
“Aye, I checked that out,” he said, putting the pipe cleaner into the bowl of his briar.
“And?”
“It was small potatoes. You want the details? Course you do, you boys always want the details. Hold on a minute and I’ll check with the robbery squad,” he said.
He went down the hall and came back with a file. He flipped it open and began to read. “Let me see, from Mulvenna and Wright they stole the cash box, two hi-fi speakers, and an ornamental ashtray. It was the fourth in a series of robberies on commercial properties that Christmas in and around Antrim.”
“So it was a pattern.”
“Aye. And we caught them in the end.”
“You caught the burglars?”
“Oh aye. They weren’t master criminals, believe me. They were tinkers. We caught three of them red handed breaking into a butcher’s shop at two in the morning. And unsurprisingly they knew nothing about Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s death.”
“Can I talk to them? Are they inside?”
“That’s a laugh. As soon as you let them out on bail they flee over the border or to England. Talk to them, he says.”
“All right. But if I understand what you’re saying, you don’t see a link between the break-in at the law firm and Lizzie’s death a few days later?”
“How could there be?”
“I don’t know. I suppose you got the names of these burglars?”
He handed me the arrest sheet. “I don’t think that’ll help you much either,” he said with a grin.
The names were Michael Mouse, Dick Turpin, and Robin Hood.
“So these burglars had done a whole series of robberies in Antrim?”
“That’s right. Mulvenna and Wright were just one more place on their list.”
“Linked how? Fingerprints?”
“Modus operandi. Geography. Chronology. Four break-ins within a couple of streets.”
“Hmmmm,” I said, and rubbed my chin. “So it’s a dead end?”
“We thought so . . . How’s your investigation going?” Beggs asked me when I had sufficiently digested all this.
I shrugged. “I’m nearly finished, I suppose. I’ve interviewed everyone that I can think of except this Lee McPhail character.”
Beggs grinned. “You’ll love him. He’s quite the customer.”
“Is he?”
“Oh yes. Big tall baldy cunt.”
“You said he had a few convictions?”
“That he has. Unemployment benefit fraud. Odometer fraud. Statutory rape.”
“Tell me about the rape.”
“Fancied himself as a bit of a ladies’ man in his day. The girl was sixteen. He was thirty-seven. Her da found out. No question of force but that’s why they call it statutory rape, isn’t it?”
“That wasn’t in the file.”
“The case was expunged because of her age.”
“How did you find out about it?”
“Maybe I’m not the lazy country copper you take me for, Duffy.”
“That’s not fair. I don’t take you for anything. It seems that you’ve done a good job here.”
“Oh, thanks very much.”
“Do you like McPhail for Lizzie’s death?”
“I wouldn’t put anything past him but I don’t like him for her death because her death was an accident.”
I sighed and shook my head. “I may be coming round to your way of thinking.”
“Oh, don’t let me influence you, Inspector Duffy! You’re Special Branch,” he said.
I didn’t take the bait. Instead I thanked him for his time and drove to Belfast.
It was a tough run in. It was raining and there were army checkpoints everywhere and soldiers have never liked the cut of my jib. I parked the Beemer at Queen Street police station and took a black taxi out to the former DeLorean plant.
When I got to Dunmurry, Joe Kennedy was already inside. The old factory was being converted into what a banner proclaimed were “Exciting new public–private sector partnerships.”
There was a pro-Kennedy crowd and an anti-Kennedy crowd waiting outside the plant. I showed my Special Branch warrant card and easily got to the front of the control barriers. It was raining and the two crowds amounted to maybe a hundred people. The Reverend Ian Paisley, MP, MEP, was trying to whip the antis into a frenzy with talk about the Antichrist and the End of Days but it was a bit of a hard sell in the rain.
I waited by the gates.
A dreary, typically Belfast scene: low clouds, power station chimneys pumping out grey death, greasy pavements, police Land Rovers, army helicopters, a rent-a-mob of religious nuts, TV camera crews hunting for visual sight bites for the evening news.
We waited and waited. Finally a limousine pulled up in front of the gates but no one got in or out and the cameramen turned their lights off again.
A wind blew from off the lough and there was a smattering of hailstones.
“Send the Antichrist back to America!” Paisley bellowed before launching into an obscure hymn that no one else, including his synthesizer player, seemed to know.
“Where are you from, mate?” an inspector from the riot squad asked me.
“Special Branch,” I told him.
“Jeez, I thought you boys had better things to do with their time than shite like this.”
Before
I could answer the gates began trundling open and the crowd surged against the crash barriers. Police radios began to crackle and the Belfast coppers linked arms.
“Have your men ready, McDougal,” a riot squad officer said to a square little red-faced man in a crash helmet.
“OK, lads, if we’re needed, we go in softly. The whole world is watching as they say,” the red-faced man told his officers.
The limo door opened, the driver got out, walked to the rear door, and opened it. A limo—God save us, even Thatcher and the Queen didn’t use a limo.
There were jeers and cheers and catcalls and then I could see Kennedy and his minders and the government men walking out of the former car plant. Paisley began singing “Jesus Loves Me This I Know” in his apocalyptic Ballymena staccato.
Kennedy seemed unfazed by the rain or the hail or his reception. His father was the martyred senator from New York, his uncle the martyred president, his other uncle, Teddy, was the current senator from Massachusetts. And he was the Dauphin.
He grinned and waved at the unsmiling faces. I had to admit that he was impressive. You noticed the hair first. Kennedy hair was far in advance of anything Ireland had to offer. It was space-age hair. It was hair for the new millennium. Irish hair was stuck somewhere in 1927. Kennedy hair had put man on the fucking moon.
Joe Kennedy had much of his uncles’ charm and their recklessness around women: in the early 1970s he had crashed a jeep that had left one female passenger paralyzed but from which he had walked unscathed. Not that that mattered in Ireland: what mattered here now was the blue suit, the well-calibrated poise oozing from every tanned pore, and the Alexandrian curl of his blond locks.
An attractive female reporter—obviously American—rushed forward with a microphone.
“What do you think of your reception here today, Joe?” she asked.
“I am always delighted to meet Irish men and women, Sandy, even when they don’t agree with me,” Kennedy replied smoothly, his teeth gleaming like an anti-missile laser.
“Go home, you bum!” someone yelled from the crowd.
“I am home!” Kennedy replied good-naturedly.
“Do you have any plans to run for Congress?” the reporter asked.
Kennedy smiled and shook his head. “Sandy, I’m not here today to talk about Congress. I’m here to talk about justice for the Irish people. I’m here to talk about ending the British policy of dividing Ireland!”
More catcalls from the crowd.
“And what is the purpose of your visit to this particular factory?”
“Our fact-finding team’s primary concern here is to make sure that any project getting US taxpayer dollars is employing equal numbers of Catholics and Protestants. For, as you know, Sandy, for centuries, for millennia, for far too long Catholics in Ireland have suffered at the hands of British imperialism!”
The reporter and the entourage nodded. This was going to play very well tonight in South Boston. The protesters knew their part and booed again en masse. For them, Joe Kennedy and the Kennedy clan stood for everything they despised about the Irish-American diaspora: rich, interfering, good hearted but essentially kind of stupid . . .
I had stopped listening to the reporter and was focusing on the entourage. Two men were standing next to Kennedy. One of them was the local MP, the Sinn Fein president, Gerry Adams, and the second was the fixer for this trip, Lee McPhail. I’d taken Lee’s photo from the file and studied it, but that was unnecessary, as he was absolutely unmistakable. Six eight, bald, with huge hands and a lupine face almost concealed by a straggly salt-and-pepper beard.
“Say no to the terrorists and their sympathizers! Say no to Rome rule! Say no to the Beast and to the Antichrist!” the Reverend Ian Paisley, MP, MEP, yelled without the need of a megaphone.
The crowd surged against the frail-looking temporary crash barriers.
And then, quite suddenly, it all went to shit.
The barriers went down, the small squad of police were engulfed by the protesters, and Kennedy no doubt wondered whether he was about to be the latest victim of the Kennedy curse.
“Get him out of here!” someone screamed.
An egg hit Kennedy on the head and he was lucky it wasn’t a half a brick. The inspector from the riot squad and myself pushed aside the TV reporter and began shoving him toward the car.
“What are you doing?” Lee McPhail screamed.
Kennedy thought that we were attacking him and lashed out at me with a neat left hook that caught me square on the face.
“For fucksake, I’m a policeman, you’ve got to get out of here!” I yelled, and shoved him toward the open door of the limo.
The crowd surged behind us. I heard the boom of a plastic bullet gun, Paisley started screaming about the Whore of Babylon, switching between the hieratic and the demotic. McPhail, Adams, Kennedy, and myself all tumbled into the limousine together.
“Drive on!” I yelled to the chauffeur.
“There’s people in the way!” he said.
“Drive slowly, then, but keep fucking moving!”
McPhail closed the limo door and we began edging our way through the crowd. Protesters were thumping on the roof and the windows and there was a tense five minutes or so before we made it on to the main road.
“The police did that on purpose!” Gerry Adams declared.
Kennedy was too shook up to say anything. I handed him a handkerchief to get the egg out of his hair.
I looked at Adams. He had no recollection at all that we had met once before in the Maze prison. Probably a good thing, as I’d been a bit pissy with him on that occasion.
“You are?” Adams said, catching me in a stare.
“Inspector Sean Duffy of RUC Special Branch,” I said.
“I shall report this. This whole thing was obviously orchestrated by British Intelligence to humiliate Mr. Kennedy,” Adams said.
“Obviously you haven’t had many dealings with British Intelligence if you think they could pull off something like this,” I said.
“I think Inspector Duffy saved our bacon,” Lee McPhail said.
“That’s what we are expected to think. The whole thing was a set-up,” Adams insisted.
“Where’s Helen? My hair’s ruined,” Kennedy whined.
The limo had reached the center of Belfast now and was making its way toward the Falls Road.
“Time for you to get out of our car!” Adams said to me.
“Do you mind if we have a chat?” I said to McPhail.
“You want to talk to me?” he asked.
“You’re a hard man to track down.”
“Chat about what?” McPhail asked breezily.
“About Lizzie Fitzpatrick’s death. I’m from the Cold Case Unit and we’re taking another look at her death. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
He nodded. “I do indeed. Aye, I’ll get out with you. Stop here, driver!”
“Who’s Lizzie Fitzpatrick?” Kennedy asked.
“Yes, who is Lizzie Fitzpatrick?” Adams wondered.
“Dermot McCann’s sister in law,” McPhail said. Adams didn’t have to be told who Dermot McCann was.
The limo pulled to a halt on Great Victoria Street. Lee opened the limo door.
“Thanks for the handkerchief,” Kennedy said.
“You’re welcome. Enjoy the rest of your stay in Belfast. We’re not all mental. It just seems that way.”
Lee and I got out and the limo pulled off into the traffic.
“The Crown Bar?” Lee suggested.
“Perfect.”
We dodged the buses, police Land Rovers, and black taxis and went into the Crown.
The Crown was my favorite Belfast pub, not just because it was a beautiful gaslit Victorian drinking saloon or because my favorite film had been shot there (Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out) or because they did an excellent pint of the black . . . no, I liked it because it was divided up into dozens of individual snugs, private booths, where you could close the door and h
ave a confidential conversation.
“What’s your poison?” I asked him.
“Whatever you’re having,” he said, which was a nice way of getting my measure.
“Two Black Bushes and two Guinnesses please,” I said to the barman.
We took them to an intimate snug near the windows at the front.
“So, Lizzie Fitzpatrick,” Lee said.
“I’ve spoken to your fishing buddies,” I said.
“I suppose that fucker Arnie Yeats told you I didn’t want us to go to the police.”
“He did tell me that. Is it not true?”
“It’s true all right. I’m from the Ardoyne, son. Born and bred. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this fallen world, it’s that you don’t go to the police with information.”
“Why not?”
“Two reasons. You don’t rat. And second, they’ll try and pin it, whatever it is, on you.”
“You want to tell me about the night of Lizzie’s death?”
“All right.”
He took me through the same timeline that Yeats and Barry Connor had given me. Either that part of it was true or they had all agreed to tell the same story.
“So by eleven thirty you’d dropped both your friends off in Belfast. What did you do next?”
“I went home.”
“Where do you live?”
“As if you don’t know . . . Botanic Avenue.”
“Two minutes away from Barry’s house.”
“Aye.”
“So by eleven thirty-five you were safe in your bed?”
“Aye.”
“You were flirting with Lizzie Fitzpatrick on the night of her death, weren’t you?”
Lee took a big drink of his Guinness and grinned at me. He had a quick smile and an alert eye.
“Am I to understand your line of reasoning here, Inspector Duffy? You think I left off my mates in Belfast at eleven thirty and then I gunned it back to Antrim to murder some girl who had rejected my advances and then I set up this elaborate fucking scheme to make it seem as if the pub was locked from the inside and she’d fallen off the bar? And I did all this just in the nick of time before the police showed up and broke the door down?”
“Well, did you?”
He laughed.
“Who’s put you up to this? Annie McCann?” he asked with a sly look from under his thick black eyebrows.
In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 18