The Cold, Cold Ground

by Adrian McKinty

  They took us to separate rooms and debriefed us.

  I told them about the evidence I had against Scavanni.

  They told me that it sounded pretty flimsy to them. They told me that Stakeknife was a valuable asset. A very valuable asset. He was now the head of the IRA’s internal security branch, the Force Research Unit, and thus a very important person indeed.

  “He might be the key figure in ending the hunger strikes. He might be the key figure to ending the Troubles.”

  I listened. I understood. I was made to sign a document that I was not allowed to read. I was made to sign The Official Secrets Act. A new team came in and it was all explained to me again.

  I signed more documents. A third team came in. It went on until ten o’clock at night. Finally they were satisfied. I would not talk. I would not prosecute Freddie. I would return to my bicycle theft case and never speak of this again.

  They asked me if I understood the big picture. I told them I understood the big picture. A middle-aged woman in a grey skirt and white blouse appeared.

  “In that case,” she said as if resuming a conversation, “we can let you go, Sergeant Duffy.”

  I stood up and looked into her brown eyes. “There’s a condition,” I said.

  Her mouth opened and closed like a Lough Neagh roach wondering if you’re going to throw him back or not. “You’re not in a position to—”

  “You tell Freddie that the killing has to stop. He’s done enough to leave his trail. The killing has to stop!”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  They dropped Laura and me in the harbour car park in Carrickfergus next to my BMW which was already there.

  She was shivering. “Cold?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Did they make you sign all those forms?” she asked.

  I nodded. “What will happen to us if we talk?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What will we do now?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s get a drink,” she suggested.

  We made it to the Dobbins for last orders. I got two triple whiskeys and two double gin and tonics. We sat by the fire. The rain came on outside. “What’s going to happen to Scavanni?” she asked.

  “Nothing.”

  She gulped her gin and tonic.

  “Drink up, folks!” Derek boomed.

  “I’ll walk you home,” I said.

  She shook her head. “Let’s go to your house. I want to be with you tonight.”

  I didn’t feel sober enough to drive the car so I left it in the car park.

  “So that’s that, he’ll never be punished for any of that?” she wondered.

  “It’s best not to think about it any more,” I said and my voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

  We walked up Taylor’s Avenue, Barn Road, Coronation Road. We went inside #113. I lit the paraffin heater. We went upstairs and hugged under the blankets and closed our eyes and maybe even slept until the men in balaclavas came down the path and sledgehammered the front door and stormed violently into the house.

  21: CORONATION ROAD

  I reached under the pillow but the revolver was still downstairs in my raincoat pocket. I put my hand over Laura’s mouth before she could scream.

  “Get under the bed. Don’t make a sound. You’ll be safe.”

  I heard the men thumping up the stairs.

  I had three or perhaps four seconds.

  If I hesitated I/we were dead.

  I grabbed a fire iron from the malfunctioning fireplace and ran naked onto the landing. I reached the top of the stairs at the same moment as the first gunman. His balaclava was impeding his field of vision but that didn’t really matter as he was a microsecond too slow onto the final step.

  I smashed the fire iron into his head, screaming as I did so.

  Metal into bone.

  He crumpled instantly and fell backwards down the stairs into gunman #2.

  Gunman #2, however, put his hand out and stopped his mate from knocking him down. He shot at me twice with a big .45 that banged horribly in the enclosed space of the staircase. The two .45 rounds missed me by inches.

  I ducked my head back round the staircase wall and desperately tried to think of a plan. They’d kill me if I went out either of the front bedroom windows and there might be a man waiting out the back too.

  Another .45 round smashed into the yucca plant at the top of the staircase. Gunman #2 had recovered and was walking slowly up the stairs.

  “C’mon, Gusty!” a voice said, a voice I recognized as Shane Davidson. So it was Billy White and his crew come to kill me before I told the world what I knew about them.

  Behind me Laura came to the bedroom door.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  I ran to the end of the landing and picked up the five-foot-tall paraffin heater by one of the handles at the top.

  “Take the other handle!” I said.

  The heater was never supposed to be moved when fuelled up and it was never supposed to be moved when burning.

  We carried it along the landing to the very edge of the stairs. It was at full capacity and it blistered and burned our hands.

  “Now, get back!” I said lifting it from the rear by both handles.

  It was searingly hot and the enamelled stainless steel scalded my chest.

  I screamed as I heaved it to the very top of the stairs.

  The scream stopped Shane in his tracks, half way up.

  He saw me and the heater, didn’t compute it for a moment. He fired his gun but the .45 slug only smashed into the heater’s plate steel spraying paraffin over him and the unconscious man beside him. I tumbled the heater at him and dived back behind the stair wall but I wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid the blast as the heater crashed into Shane and the glass flue shattered and all the fuel ignited at once. There was an explosion and the shock wave flung me against the landing wall.

  I tried to stay upright but I couldn’t manage it and I fell down the stairs into the horror of burning men and white-hot metal.

  I went head over heels into the glass phone table by the front door.

  An eviscerated, burning Shane slid down the stairs on top of me. I yelled in horror and kicked him off.

  I managed to stand and through the open front door a machine gun opened up on me from the street.

  I dived to the carpet and crawled into the hall as AK-47 rounds tore up the vacuum above my head and broke and span and yawed off the walls and the ceiling.

  Splinters, sparks, Libyan 7.62x39mm tracer rounds racing right through the house and across Carrickfergus towards their destiny in Belfast Lough.

  I did a quick triage to see if I was in one piece.

  Pain everywhere but there was nothing broken and I wasn’t on fire.

  “Sean!” Laura screamed from upstairs.

  “I’m all right!” I yelled.

  I could see the rest of the hit crew now in a black Transit parked in front of my house. A guy with a Kalashnikov in the passenger’s seat and that wasn’t the worst of it – the van’s side door was open and there were two more men inside priming a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.

  An RPG.

  A Land Rover killer.

  But then I saw my SMG. The Sterling M4 9mm sub-machine gun that had been sitting on the hall table for two goddamn weeks.

  I grabbed it and snapped in the curved clip.

  Thirty-four rounds between me and death.

  Thirty-four rounds and skill. I had one crucial advantage. I had put the hours in on the range and they, obviously, were firing their weapons for the first or perhaps second time in their lives.

  I got to my feet, unfolded the stock and braced the weapon against my shoulder.

  I put my left hand on the ventilated barrel casing and walked into the valley of the RPG.

  I squeezed the trigger and fire spat from the barrel and the weapon hummed and the open bolt sang like Ella Fitzgerald.

 
I walked down the garden path looking through the iron sight. Bullets whizzed all around but I was aiming, they were shooting. I aimed first at the men with the grenade launcher.

  I hit my target and Death opened their eyes and they fell into his radiance, blood pouring from head wounds, chest wounds, ripped arteries and veins. Eternity revealed to them its mysteries and they tumbled backwards into the van and dropped the RPG launcher at their feet.

  I turned the Sterling on the man with the AK-47. In his excitement the muzzle on his weapon had already ridden so high that he might have been trying to bring down the Space Shuttle. I gave him a burst that ripped through the transit van’s aluminium door and ricocheted inside his body, slicing up his internal organs so badly that while the AK was still firing, blood was filling the balaclava and pouring out of his mouth.

  That was enough for the driver who hit the accelerator pedal. The van leapt forward, the clutch slipped and it stalled. The driver didn’t panic.

  He leaned across his dead partner, reached for something on the floor, and before I had time to react, gave me both barrels from a sawed-off shotgun.

  Shotgun pellets travelled towards me at 1200 feet per second.

  That’s 120 feet in a tenth of a second.

  White-hot lead in my chest, neck and shoulders.

  My beloved Sterling tumbling from my arms.

  White-hot lead and a feeling of weightlessness.

  Weightlessness and then hard cement.

  Stars.

  Footsteps.

  The driver got out of the van. He rolled up his balaclava and walked towards me. From his jacket pocket he removed a Browning pistol fitted with a suppressor.

  I almost laughed.

  Why a silencer after all this?

  He stood above me and looked down.

  “You had to stick your fucking neb in, didn’t ya? You had to open your big yapper. Can’t you fucking take a hint? After all them ciggies we give you too,” he said.

  He raised the gun.

  I closed my eyes.

  Held my breath.

  A bang.

  Silence.

  When I opened my eyes again Bobby Cameron was staring at me and shaking his head. Billy White was dead to my left with the back of his head blown off.

  Bobby was grinning.

  “Why?” I managed.

  He shrugged. “They didn’t ask me first. They didn’t ask me for permission and this is my street!”

  His grin faded.

  The stars faded.

  I saw Laura run out of the burning hall with a blanket over her head. Smart, that lass.

  I was losing a lot of blood. My head was light.

  I heard sirens.

  Bobby safetied the 9mm, wiped it clean and left it next to me.

  I nodded.

  If I lived, I’d tell them it was me.

  “This is my fucking street,” Bobby said again.

  22: THE CONVERSATION

  In and out of the whiteness. In and out of the silence. Faces:

  Mum and Dad. Laura. Matty. McCrabban. Brennan. McCallister. Doctors. Nurses. My mum again, holding my hand. Tears on her cheeks. Tears on her good blue dress. Fear in her blue-grey eyes.

  Night.

  An alarm.

  A crisis.

  Doctors younger than me. An old man I did not know. An old man startled from sleep, muttering words over me and holding a crucifix above my forehead. “Dómine sancte, Pater omnípotens, aetérne Deus, qui, benedictiónis tuae grátiam aegris infundéndo corpóribus, factúram tuam multíplici pietáte custódis: ad invocatiónem tui nóminis benígnus assíste; ut fámulum tuum ab ægritúdine liberátum, et sanitáte donátum, déxtera tua érigas, virtúte confírmes, potestáte tueáris, atque Ecclésiæ tuae sanctae, cum omni desideráta prosperitáte, restítuas.”

  A night boat. A night boat crossing the Irish Sea. A journey through darkness. The moon smothered by fragments of the dark. The stars mouthing hermetic songs.

  A curlew on the lava beach. Auguries in the movement of the birds …

  Time passed.

  I could tell the different nurses by their perfumes.

  I could sense the difference between the shifts.

  I could tell when I was awake and dreaming.

  “Ach, you’re doing much better now,” the one with the lovely Scottish accent said, touching my bruises with her fingers.

  I had had surgeries to remove shotgun pellets from my stomach, right lung, ribcage and one that was nestled against my aorta.

  The surgeries had been long though not difficult.

  Then there had been complications.

  Haemorrhaging.

  An immune system attacking itself.

  I had been put in an induced coma for four weeks after they had trepanned my skull to relieve the pressure on my brain.

  For another fortnight they had kept me medicated and semiconscious.

  When I became fully aware of where I was, it was the middle of July.

  Six weeks of intensive care followed.

  My condition moved from “critical” to “serious” to “improving”.

  I wasn’t starved for visitors.

  My mum and dad. Aunts and uncles dredged up from all over Ireland. Most of Carrickfergus RUC.

  Laura.

  Eventually I was moved to an open ward.

  I got to know the heart patients and the car-crash victims.

  The world outside the hospital continued without us.

  Prince Charles married Lady Di in St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Shergar won the Derby by ten lengths.

  The Deputy Chief Constable came by to tell me that I had been recommended for the Queen’s Police Medal. He also told me that he personally had seen to it that I would get my full pay, minus my uniform allowance, until I could return to duty, but that to do this I would have to wave my claims under the Victims of Terrorism Compensation Act.

  I signed his forms and he went away happy.

  My dad went round my house, ripped out the stair and rebuilt and repainted it.

  He told me that everyone on Coronation Road had been “asking for me”.

  The riots continued.

  The hunger strikes continued, but it was clear that they were winding down. The families of the hunger strikers appealed to the Primate of All Ireland, Cardinal Daly; he pleaded with the men in the H Blocks and many of them began ending their fast.

  Seamus Moore came off along with several others.

  Michael “Mickey” Devine was the last man to die on 21 August 1981. I’d known Red Mickey in Derry. Not a bad lad. He’d been arrested and sent to prison for possession of a stolen shotgun.

  In the English papers the suspending of the hunger strikes was portrayed as a massive victory for Mrs Thatcher. She had not given in to the terrorists. She had won.

  Nevertheless, she quietly sacked her Secretary of State for Northern Ireland – the incompetent Sir Humphrey Atkins – and brought in James Prior. Prior immediately flew to the Maze Prison and promised that if the hunger strike was formally brought to a close then the British government would “strongly consider all of the prisoners’ demands”. Journalists began leaving Belfast for new trouble spots around the globe.

  In my world it was much the same.

  The “gay serial killer” case was closed. Billy White was tagged as the chief suspect. Shane Davidson had been his accomplice. Two repressed self-hating secret homosexuals. They had killed Tommy Little and Andrew Young and all the others …

  They were disowned by the UVF and their families. Who knew why they had done it? As a pathology or because of some dispute with Tommy Little and then the others to cover up their crime? Who can see into the hearts of men?

  But I knew. There had never been a gay serial killer. Northern Ireland was not the soil in which serial killers grew. If you wanted to murder a lot of people you joined the paramilitaries and used that as cover for your sociopathic tendencies …

  Anywhere else this case would hav
e been big news, but Ulster in 1981 had other things on its mind.

  I tried to forget it. I had physiotherapy to do and water therapy and exercises.

  I began exercising in the hospital. My mum bought me a Sony Walkman. Crabbie brought me a mix tape of country standards. Matty brought me a mix tape of Adam and the Ants and The Human League.

  I learned to walk again and I listened to music and an audiobook novel Laura brought me called Midnight’s Children.

  One morning in the papers I read that at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg the case of the Dudgeon v UK had been decided against the British government. A panel of judges had ruled 15:4 that Northern Ireland’s laws against homosexuality violated the European Convention on Human Rights. Mrs Thatcher’s Attorney General said that the law in Northern Ireland would have to be changed. That homosexual acts between consenting adults would have to be made legal.

  The Catholic Church objected. The Free Presbyterian Church objected. The political parties objected. The paramilitaries objected. Something had brought the Protestants and Catholics together at last. But there was little they could do. Britain couldn’t leave Europe, or renounce the Treaty, the law was going to change …

  I got a new doctor. An intern from Nigeria. He told me that as soon I could walk fifty feet without a stick he would let me go. In a week I proved it to him by walking from one side of the ward to another.

  I was released from hospital on September 23.

  Laura drove me back to Coronation Road. My grass had been mown and roses planted in my garden. The hall was filled with cards and letters. I could barely get through the front door.

  Chief Inspector Brennan came to see me and told me to take my time before coming back to work.

  I told him I would.

  The next day Bobby Cameron came to see me. He brought bacon, milk and sausages. He told me that I had taken out a six man UFF assassination team and that under normal circumstances, me being a fenian and all, I’d be well advised to leave Northern Ireland, or at the very least Coronation Road.

  “But these aren’t normal circumstances, are they?” Bobby said with a sleekit grin.