She wanted to recoil but kept still and maintained eye contact. She was stronger than the man opposite and only his rank protected him. Still, she had to play it smart – proving she had a pair of balls might just backfire, and his face was telling her that she might regret this conversation.
‘The thing is, sir, that I’m not sure Lesley Thompson is ready to run the operation. As chief inspector she would be directly involved as my deputy. She’d be on the ground, making difficult decisions in real time. She has no experience of this type of situation. As far as I know she’s had little operational experience. I just worry that she’ll be thrown into a situation she’s had no training for.’
She thought that was enough and that at least she’d said it, making sure it sounded like she was concerned for Thompson. What she couldn’t say was that they couldn’t afford to have someone making a critical decision that would basically clusterfuck the job and leave the Belfast criminals undamaged.
The chief super saw it all now. It was as he suspected – and as O’Connor had told him. Macallan would not like an equally talented female officer grabbing success in front of her eyes. The old excuse that detectives knew best. He gripped his pen so tight his knuckles turned white.
‘First of all the decision to move staff around is not yours, Superintendent.’ He couldn’t meet her eyes but carried on, and she caught the strain in his voice. ‘Lesley Thompson is a highly qualified officer and quite likely to reach executive rank. She’s managed staff, and according to Superintendent O’Connor, she is someone who can take charge wherever she goes.’
That was it, and Macallan should have seen it coming. O’Connor must have played mind games with Thompson, seeing her as a weakling, before managing to dump a potential disaster right into her lap. He’d manipulated Thompson as much as the chief super. He was an experienced detective and was fully aware that filling the deputy’s post with Thompson would undermine the confidence of every detective on the team.
The chief super decided to stick the boot in where it hurt most. ‘I hope this has nothing to do with your personal feelings and your previous failed relationship with him. I know my predecessor took the view that he had been at fault for the Barclay case, but I have my own views.’
Macallan couldn’t see it but she felt a scarlet flush spreading up from her chest to neck. She was angry and wanted to walk round the table and squeeze his undoubtedly tiny balls till he squeaked an apology. Their conversation was going nowhere, and she conceded that she’d made the wrong call.
‘Okay, sir. There’s nothing more to say, and I’ll do everything to help Lesley.’ She turned to go.
‘Just a second, Superintendent.’
The chief super had turned the tables, at least in his own mind. ‘I hope you will support her. I don’t want to hear any reports to the contrary. You may be popular with your admirers in the media, but I can assure you that makes no difference to me. Are we clear?’
She nodded, and as she closed the door behind her she squeezed her eyes shut and lifted her face to the ceiling. Under her breath she squeezed out the word ‘tosser’, not noticing that his secretary was watching her through the open door of an adjacent office.
When she opened her eyes she stiffened at the sight of the smiling woman sipping tea before nodding back and heading to her office, trying to dampen down her rage. It was always the same – people seeing motives that didn’t exist. The man was just an inadequate little fuck.
When Macallan summoned McGovern, Thompson and Felicity Young into the office she was tight, pale and pissed off. They all knew she’d spoken to the chief super in private and whatever had happened obviously hadn’t made her day.
She gave them orders to get the research going on Billy Nelson and a conventional surveillance running on his life. ‘Let’s see what picture we can build up in the next week but hopefully we’ll be able to go for the technicals. I also want you to urge the source unit to get their handlers rumbling up their informants to see what they can find out for us. Anything they can get on the dealers who’ve been attacked. It all helps.’
After she’d answered their questions they left the room, and Macallan closed the door of her office and did not emerge till she decided to go home.
McGovern was sure he could work out what the problem was as he looked over to where Thompson was sitting, trying her best to look like a working detective. Good luck, Grace – you’re going to need it, he thought. He wondered again where men like the chief super came from. Who the fuck decided they deserved high rank?
He saw Macallan leave the office about five, which proved she was upset – even on a good day she normally had to be surgically removed at seven or eight.
On the bad days she hardly went home at all.
Macallan had been struggling with her door key for weeks; there’d been a problem with the door that she’d simply ignored as something that would go away. She wondered why she just didn’t get someone to fix it and imagined being trapped inside with her phone out of juice. She managed a smile at the thought that she’d be found dead and alone, which would be followed by the inevitable propagation of numerous conspiracy theories.
When she finally got inside, she made some decaf tea, fighting against the urge to have a shot of the Talisker she kept in case of emergencies. Experience of living alone had made her very aware that the bottle just stood there, waiting for her moments of weakness. She tried to divert her need for a proper drink and stuck Bob Dylan on, skipping tracks until she got to ‘Watching the River Flow’. The twanging guitar and lyrics always soothed her, sucking her into words that were all about escape.
Macallan bounced around the room and wondered why she’d never been able to dance. It was as if her body was being charged with intermittent shocks. Even at the booziest function she only did the slow dances, or the ‘walk round the floor’ as she called them.
Dylan worked his magic on her, and after another couple of tracks she felt the need to climb under the sheets and shut out the world.
She had only been asleep long enough to feel exhausted when her mobile rang.
‘Grace? Sorry it’s so late but I’ve just finished. You okay there?’
Jack Fraser’s voice brought her back to life.
She buried deeper under the covers and found herself chatting to him, just as she had before their enforced break-up. And as they talked, they forgot the past and returned to what had made them good together in the first place.
The clock moved but they lost all sense of time. One of them had to end the conversation at some point, but neither seemed to be inclined to be the instigator. Eventually Fraser caved in: ‘I’ll be across later next week, so book me in for dinner. Looking forward to it.’
Reluctantly she put the phone down and tried to settle again, her mind full of Fraser and wondering what was coming. It wasn’t until about 4 a.m. that she finally dropped into sleep.
She dreamed and saw Fraser playing his last game of rugby. She was there and tried to put on her sympathetic face as he came off the field, secretly glad that he’d retired before one of those younger sixteen-stone hooligans left him damaged for the rest of his life.
The dream changed to faceless men who whispered to each other in the shadows, and all she could hear was the harsh edge of their Belfast accents. She didn’t recognise the street they were on. It was snowing, and when she looked behind her she could see her footprints.
The men came out of the shadows towards her, but she couldn’t see them, just the marks they made in the snow, coming at her from all sides. Her throat started to close in panic and the snow had the consistency of mud, sucking her downwards until it reached her waist. She called for Bill Kelly, but he didn’t come.
The footprints were all around her now, and the whispering grew louder and louder as the snow covered her mouth and her lungs froze as she tried to draw breath but only sucked in the suffocating white substance . . .
Her eyes sprang open; she looked round and thought for just
a moment that Fraser was beside her again. Then the dream was gone and she knew who those voices in the dream belonged to – and that she’d meet them in the flesh.
Billy Nelson was awake as Macallan drifted back into sleep. The cruel, dead light from the street lamps half-lit his room, and the pain in his gut was like a rat slowly gnawing his insides and causing all the pain he could take in one go. He had next to no education but was intelligent enough to know that whatever was wrong, it was bad. When he’d shaved the previous morning he’d noticed the loss of flesh round his cheeks. There was a vein near his left eye that had been barely visible all his life, but now it shone clear and blue through his tight skin, and he’d stared at it for what seemed like an age.
He’d asked himself a dozen times whether it could be his imagination but the rat in his gut was nothing to do with imagination. He was angry, and a shiver of fear sparked through his body. It had never occurred to him that he could be suffering from an illness – that was for other people, not Billy Nelson the paratrooper and all-round hard bastard.
The air was cool in the room, but there was a film of foul-smelling sweat covering his body. He curled up into a ball and accepted that he needed help, but he couldn’t tell the rest of the team – any form of weakness would attract the wolves, and they were always close, smelling the air, and savage when they attacked. There was no friendly handshake at the handover of power. Look what he’d done to the Flemings: buried while life still flickered inside at least one of their ravaged bodies.
‘Fuck it, fuck it, fuck it!’ He squeezed his eyes shut and prayed that it was no more than an ulcer; given the number of combat missions he’d taken, an ulcer wouldn’t be such a surprise. He could recover and be as good as new. He decided that whatever it took, he would visit Joe Fleming’s widow and straighten her out. She was still running her mouth off around the city, telling anyone who would listen that she was going to take Nelson out.
He managed a smile at the thought. ‘No fuckin’ way, Billy boy. No fuckin’ way.’
14
Macallan was trying to wade her way through the deluge of paper that crossed her desk every day. She shook her head and wondered what half of it had to do with her, although such questions didn’t get the replies completed. Luckily the phone rang to tell her that the PSNI officer was at the front counter. She’d sent a request to the Belfast HQ asking if they could provide intelligence on Nelson and his associates, knowing they would have it and that the intelligence-gathering machine that was still in place could hold some answers for them. Paramilitary attacks still took place, and there were enough dissident Republicans to keep the security services on guard. Up until then all Macallan had was names from informants in the drugs trade. The intelligence was patchy but it was clear that people were terrified to cross the men from Belfast, which came as no surprise to her.
The PSNI officer was Detective Inspector Barry Wallace, who she knew from her Special Branch days in Belfast, although she’d never worked with him. He had a good reputation, which had been enough for a PIRA active service unit to try to kill him when he was out jogging during the bad days of the Troubles.
McGovern showed him into the room and he greeted Macallan warmly, which was a relief, as she was never sure how her past in the service would affect people. He was a tall, thin man and looked more like an old-fashioned preacher than a Branch officer. Of course, she reminded herself, there was no Branch now, the name having been buried as part of the move to the new Northern Ireland. It had been anathema to the Republicans, who saw it as the murderous arm of an oppressive state that had spent decades persecuting and exploiting the Catholic community. What had been the Branch had been rechristened with the rather anodyne label of C3.
She took to Wallace immediately; he was an engaging man with the typical Ulster sense of humour that could find a way to laugh at almost anything in life – an antidote to the tragedies that had taken so many men and women from the old RUC force.
Senior analyst Felicity Young joined them for the meeting and Macallan knew that she would be needed. Young was known affectionately as ‘the brain’ with good reason – she was capable of seeing and making links in intelligence even where the information lay buried in the mountains of reports that flowed into the ravenous systems of law-enforcement agencies across the UK. It was a gift, and she could take leaps of imagination, landing squarely on the smallest detail that would complete a hypothesis or a possible line of investigation. She’d had a relationship with Harkins before he’d been so badly injured, and she still regretted losing him. Macallan knew that Harkins felt exactly the same but would never want Young taking care of him; in his view he was only half the man she’d found so appealing at the time.
Wallace was blunt with his – or rather the PSNI’s – position. ‘I’m sure you understand we still have more than enough problems keeping our eyes and electronic ears locked onto those men whose sole aim in life is to kill soldiers or police officers. We will provide intelligence but only under strict assurances of how it’s used. You know as well as I do that much of it comes from human sources, and we’re not prepared to risk agents’ lives just because your team don’t understand the concept of “sensitive sources”.’
That was how Macallan wanted it – straight and to the point.
‘There’s probably no one who understands more than I do about what’s at risk,’ she replied. ‘You’ll know I had my own experience of the consequences when it’s not understood.’
They’d both served in the RUC and its successor, the PSNI, and in that closed community everyone knew everyone else’s story, so Macallan’s downfall and ruined personal life had been hung out for all to see. It had kept the canteen gossips going for months, and Wallace would know every detail of that particular tragedy.
After a pause Wallace nodded, confident that she meant every word she said. She had to, and he couldn’t believe she would want another disaster involving her old force.
They agreed the protocol that any intelligence would be passed through secure systems and heavily sanitised to protect the sources, meaning the relevant information would be passed, but any references that could expose the source would be removed or disguised. They agreed that Young would liaise with her counterpart in PSNI HQ and completed the agreements on information exchange before the coffee was brought in and they could get down to business.
Wallace asked Macallan for a briefing on what exactly their problem was and she asked Young to take the floor, knowing the analyst would take up more of their time than necessary but that she would miss nothing. There would be diagrams and some language that could only be understood by someone of an equivalent intellect – but by the close they would be clear about what they had and, more importantly, what they were missing. The man from Belfast would be left with no doubt about where the holes were, and he might be able to provide the information they were missing.
Young treated intelligence and information like a recreational drug and was pleased to have something big to sink her teeth into. She needed intelligence to get to her solutions, and this was where she found her highs now that Harkins was no longer in her bed at night.
Wallace watched Young perform, realised that his hosts had a problem and that they had no idea of its scale. He could tell that Macallan sensed it was worse than her colleagues suspected and that it needed to be hit hard and early. Her intuition told her what he knew as fact – that if these ex-UVF gangsters took a grip on the drugs trade in the east of Scotland, it would be the razor-sharp edge of an extremely toxic wedge. There was a struggle going on for control of the organised-crime market in Northern Ireland, which was overpopulated with paramilitary veterans of the Troubles. These men had all the skills learned in the conflict, and there was a demand for their expertise, but now they were all looking for other opportunities outside Belfast. There had been headlines for years about the Loyalist fallings-out and banishments to the mainland. The tabloid readers had seen the pictures and horror stories about sha
ven-headed steroid junkies taking up residence among reluctant taxpayers on the west side of the country. If Nelson managed to establish a solid base, there would be other Loyalists happy to come in and enjoy life in the capital city. The police would be blamed – and careers fell for less.
‘I think I can help you,’ Wallace said. ‘First of all you have a number of problems – and you’re only seeing one side of it. Let me introduce you to some people; they’re all good Loyalist boys from the Shankill.’ His sarcasm came from bitter experience and the memories of innocent Catholics picked up by the Loyalist gangs and killed for being in the wrong part of the city. ‘They’re all hard men, and if they’re planning to operate here that’s bad news.’
Wallace pulled two photographs from his briefcase and laid them out on the table. One was of Jackie Martin, a custody picture taken after a serious assault in an East Belfast pub. The victim had been happy to help the police until his wife had taken a phone call explaining who had been arrested and what the price would be for pointing his finger at Jackie Martin. Her husband had developed a delayed case of amnesia and Mr Martin had been home for dinner the following day. The second photograph was of Billy Nelson and was obviously a surveillance shot taken on the day he was summoned to see Martin. Next to the surveillance photograph was an army-identification photograph of Nelson in uniform.
Macallan had seen so many like Nelson – handsome and hard, ready for trouble whenever it came. His blood would be orange; his mind indoctrinated since birth.
Wallace outlined what Jackie Martin had been and what he was now. ‘He’s a bastard of the first order, and we know he killed a number of innocent Catholics during the Troubles. Like some of his more well-known colleagues, he was one of those who enjoyed pulling the trigger himself. An animal. He only cares about the Loyalist cause now when it suits him and has made a complete move over to organised crime. He’s involved in drugs, money laundering, runs a number of prostitutes and enjoys using them as much as his other customers.’
Evidence of Death Page 12