by Ian McDonald
‘Nothing, thank you.’
‘So, how can I help you?’
Willich looks to Dunbar. It’s a game of patience, of laying cards on the table and turning them up, one by one. Card one: a long-lens photograph of Andy Gillespie stolen in the moment it takes him to fumble for the keys to his flat.
‘Do you know this man?’ Dunbar asks.
‘Looks like a man I was inside with.’ He’s up front about that. ‘What was his name? Gillespie?’
‘Did you know him well?’
He shakes his head. ‘Just by name, really.’
‘He’s been in prison. Like you. Do you know what he was inside for?’
‘I understand he was driver on an attempted murder of a drugs dealer on the Newtownards Road in 2001,’ Peterson says. Wise, Dunbar thinks. While you don’t know how much we know, you’ll play along.
‘It was set up by the Third Battalion of the UVF,’ she says.
‘You think that because he was in the paramilitaries, and because your commanding officer put me away for paramilitary activities, we were all best buddies in the Maze?’ Peterson says. ‘That hit was probably against another Loyalist group, UFF, someone like that. They all sold themselves out for drug money. Gangsters, the lot of them. I tell you this, we never, ever, dirtied our hands with drugs.’
‘Have you seen him since your release?’
‘Only on the television; that murder you’re investigating. Do you think he did it?’
Roisin Dunbar takes a long, slow tactical look out of Peterson’s window. The hard wind from off the hills is chasing empty crisp packets round and round in the lee of a buttress. Different climate this side of the city. Three degrees colder in any weather. There must be a pattern to the way the cars come off the motorway on to the Glengormley roundabout. Card two. Ounserrat Soulereya, leaving Pizza Di Action with a pizza box in one hand and her helmet in the other.
‘Do you recognize this Outsider?’
He purses his lips.
‘They all look the same to me. I don’t know any Sheenies. I don’t want to know any.’
‘You’ve never had any contact with Shian?’
‘There was one, in the Maze same time as me. Your friend Gillespie hung around with it a lot. Him and another guy, a Catholic.’ He says the C-word like it’s a bad taste in his mouth. This C-word policewoman’s got you by the balls. You’re smiling, you’re liking it, you’re enjoying the attention because now she’s playing with them, stroking them, tickling them, but you’ll be singing a new song in a higher key when she starts to twist them.
‘Do you know what a frook is, Mr Peterson?’
‘I don’t recognize the word.’
‘A frook is a human with a sexual fixation on the Shian. It takes many forms, but primarily it’s a kind of fetishism.’ Littlejohn mode. Effortless. Willich’s concealing a smile, but she’s watching Peterson’s reaction. ‘Sometimes it’s just a desire to dress Shian fashion, wear body make-up, contact lenses, and be as close as possible to Outsiders. Most often, it’s a desire to have sex with a Shian, male or female, regardless of season. In the more extreme states, they may undergo cosmetic surgery to make themselves look like Shian. It’s a small, close subculture. They have their own clubs, newssheets, Internet bulletin boards, contact magazines.’
‘As a member of a Bible-believing, born-again Church, I find this morally repugnant.’
Twist.
‘But not so morally repugnant that you weren’t at a frook club on Little Howard Street between one thirty and three o’clock this morning.’ Card three. Ace of trumps. She had waited, finger on button, until he stepped from the shadowed door into the full light from the street lamp across the road. Harry Lime moment. No mistaking. No possibility of error. You, you sanctimonious bastard. You. In the window, the Chinese duck swings.
‘Gavin, you were a lying turd then and you’re a lying turd now,’ Willich says. ‘I think we’re going to have to have you down at the station for a wee chat.’
Got his balls, and chained them to the fucking floor.
At five she takes a break for a Diet Coke and a sandwich and a call to Michael that it’s going to be another late nighter. Wee Millie’s got dexies. God knows where from. Dunbar pops a couple with her Diet Coke. She’ll be questioning Peterson from the ceiling of the interview room, but at least the question will make sense. A long slow slash, while she finishes the Coke. Silence. Solitude. Something very settling and centring about bare bum on cold government plastic. This is the moment when, if she smoked, she would smoke. Ready for round two. The dexies must be kicking in already.
It’s way past his quitting time but Littlejohn is lurking outside the ladies.
‘Cracked him yet?’ She really doesn’t want to talk with Littlejohn, here, now. She keeps walking. He keeps step with her. He will talk with her.
‘He admits he was in the club, he even admits he met Andy Gillespie but denies any knowledge of a gun-running ring.’
‘Of course he does. He’s nothing to do with gun-running. You know as well as I that’s complete bullshit.’
‘I got bollocked by Willich for agreeing with you.’
‘At least you still have your soul. Willich isn’t going to get the real story out of our born-again friend Peterson. He’s asking the wrong questions.’
‘Who’s going to ask the right questions? You?’
‘Before I made a career path switch to aliens, I used to be a middling-to-good human psychologist. You don’t lose the old skills. Like riding a bike.’
‘What will you ask him?’
‘Why did he kill five members of the Harridi Nation at University Street on March the second 2004?’
She stops in the corridor ten steps short of Interview Room number three.
‘Get serious.’
‘He fits the profile. I read your files. This washed-in-the-blood praise-the-Lorder blew three Roman Catholics away and would have blown away a whole pother more if Willich hadn’t caught him. Shian are just Taigs with funny haircuts.’
‘And the fact that Gillespie was in the club with him?’
‘Ireland’s a small world; frooks are even smaller. He and the genro were following their own investigation. There aren’t that many places for them to look. Peterson was there looking for prey.’
‘You’re grasping at straws. When I found Eamon Donnan, you told me categorically it was him.’
‘Him, someone like him. No shortage of contenders, I’m afraid. This country is the mother of fuck-ups. The facts are Donnan fits the profile, Peterson fits the profile. Half of the male Loyalist population of Belfast fits the profile. But Peterson’s the one you’ve got in your interview room and I know I can crack him, I can find out what he’s really about. Willich can’t.’
Dunbar hands Littlejohn the empty Diet Coke can and the bottom left corner of her tuna and mayo sandwich. There’s onion in it. Great for interview intimidation: onion breath.
‘One thing I know for certain, this has nothing to do with a weapons smuggling conspiracy,’ Littlejohn says, hands full of snack. ‘Rosh, get me ten minutes with him.’
Don’t call me that. She hesitates just a moment before opening the interview room door and going in.
‘DS Dunbar has re-entered the room at seventeen twelve,’ Willich tells the tape. He sighs, lights up another cigarette. The atmosphere already carries a health warning.
‘Would you mind not doing that?’ Peterson says.
‘Since when were you Mr Health and Efficiency?’
‘The body is the temple of the spirit.’
Willich stubs the cigarette out and says, ‘So, try and convince me of this again. If you weren’t attempting to buy Outsider weapons off Andy Gillespie, if you don’t have any connections with the Free Men of Ulster, if you haven’t the least idea what I’m talking about when I mention Cloaks of Shadows, then what the hell were you doing in that frook club?’
‘Maybe he likes them,’ Roisin Dunbar says. ‘Maybe he’s got a
wardrobe full of their clothes, maybe he’s got his bedroom wall covered in pin-ups of supermodels. Maybe he’s got a heap of mags and video under the bed. Maybe that’s what he had in the envelope, a porny video.’
‘Is that the best you can do?’ Peterson wears a look of weary disgust. ‘Wee girls pretending they’re Elliot Ness? Well, go on with it. I’m enjoying the show. I’m not under arrest, I haven’t done anything you can charge me with, I just sit here a couple more hours listening to you doing your double act, and then I’m home. Or you could save everyone’s time and let me go and that wee girl home to make her husband his tea.’
‘Boss.’ He’s made her mind up for her now. She was going to leave it, but he’s earned it now. ‘A wee word, outside?’
‘I’m pausing this interview at seventeen seventeen to leave the room temporarily with DS Dunbar.’ Willich hits the pause. A yellow light comes on.
‘Oh aye, this is where the lads with the big sticks come in,’ Peterson says.
Outside, Littlejohn is in the same position she left him. The Coke can and the chewed tuna and mayo have disappeared.
‘Boss, let him do it.’
‘What for? It’s nothing to do with him.’
‘Peterson’s taking the piss out of us. We can’t charge him for being at a frook club, he knows it. Littlejohn’ll scare him.’
‘He’ll eat him with salt.’
‘I know how these people work,’ Littlejohn says.
‘You know fuck.’
‘Had a profitable and enjoyable five hours then?’
‘A change of tack can’t hurt,’ Dunbar says, quick to mollify the breed bulls. Jesus, you can almost smell the testosterone. ‘Boss, with respect, he’s getting back at you for the time you sent him down. He’s playing with you, and you’re just feeding him lines.’
No one moves. No one speaks. On the edge of hearing, the sprinkler drips. Count of twenty, fhlat fhlat fhlat.
‘OK.’ Dunbar close her eyes: a prayer of thanksgiving to the policeperson’s god. ‘But Rosh and me both sit in with you.’
‘Agreed.’
He’s started before Willich can complete the recording formalities.
‘Tell me Gavin, did you ever have greenfly? Did you ever have a house plant and one day you’d see maybe a couple of greenfly at the base of a leaf and next time you looked the thing was crawling with them? No stopping them, was there? And no matter how much you sprayed them, you couldn’t get rid of them completely, could you? They kept breeding, and breeding, and breeding. If you left a greenfly to breed, and nothing ate it or killed it, at the end of one year you’d have so many greenfly that if they stood in a line they’d stretch two and a half thousand light years. Light years, Gavin. Quite something, aren’t they? Wee grubby pasty things you can hardly see, but they’re the winners in the reproduction stakes. Humans can manage one new human every year, and it’s thirteen years minimum before they can breed new humans. Greenfly’ve got us well beaten. No wonder you have to keep them under control. If they can reach halfway to the centre of the galaxy in one year, how long before they take over the world?’
‘Who let this clown in here?’ Peterson says. Senses stretched by dexedrine, Roisin Dunbar imagines she can hear an edge of tension in his flat voice.
‘Maybe the greenfly are the heirs of the earth. Maybe God intended it for them, not for us. They’re certainly better at subduing and possessing it. Maybe they should have it. What do you think, Gavin?’
‘You what?’
‘I’m interested in what you think about greenfly. Should we let them rule the world or not?’
‘Do I have to answer this fool?’
‘You do,’ Willich says.
‘OK. Greenfly. You get a big bug spray. You take the top off. You point it. You press the button. Greenfly problem sorted. They aren’t ruling the world any more.’
Littlejohn pauses, fiddles with his beard. He is playing, Dunbar thinks. He has power here. He controls language, and who controls language controls thought. He loves this power. His children are gone, his wife is gone, his job is going nowhere; the only thing he can control are the words. Psychologist, shrink thyself.
‘You’re not married, are you, Gavin?’
‘I’m not.’
‘You never were, were you?’
‘If you know this why are you asking me?’
‘No girlfriends, no live-ins.’
‘No.’
‘It wasn’t a question this time. Did you ever have any girlfriends, Gavin?’
‘Yes. Plenty. I’m not a homosexual pervert.’
‘I never said you were, Gavin. OK, plenty of girlfriends, but nothing longer than’— he shrugs, opens his hands — ‘six months? Three months?’
‘A couple of months, if you really want to know.’
‘Your mates, Gavin. I suppose they’re lost causes. Wives. Houses. Cars. DIY. Home furnishing. Trips to B & Q on a Sunday. Satellite TV. Big stereos. Holidays in Disneyworld. Big repayments. Big mortgages. Children. Children all over the place; you’re tripping over their bikes and slipping on their roller skates and kicking their toys, and when you go to see your mates all they talk about is babies and schools and who’s got what sickness and will have to go to the doctor and they’ve got their sprogs’ scrawls stuck up on the fridge with magnets and you can’t even take them out for a wee jar or two because the wee wifey’s at her step aerobics on Tuesdays and they can’t get a minder. Great lads, gone to pot. And you’re the only real, free man among them.
‘Are you, Gavin?’
‘They’ve got their lives, I’ve got mine. I’ve got the church, that’s my family.’
‘But no kids, Gavin. When you die, you don’t leave anything behind. You don’t continue. You stop. Your geneline withers and dries up. All your mates are reproducing like greenfly, offspring everywhere, new generations, they’re going to live for ever! And you’re sterile, Gavin. You’re going to die out from the earth.’
‘I don’t want kids. I don’t like kids.’
Littlejohn says nothing, but he has that Littledick, too-smart, over-educated look in his eyes. Roisin Dunbar feels sorry for Gavin Peterson. Almost.
‘Did you ever take a look at the last census, Gavin? The one back in 2000? Of course that was before the Outsiders arrived and bollixed the figures up. You should have a read of it some time. You’d find it fascinating. It makes some interesting predictions about the demographic make-up. It seems that one dividend of the Slow Peace no one foresaw was a baby boom. All of a sudden there’s a future to bring children into. The good people of Ulster have been rutting like rabbits ever since. What’s really interesting is how this baby boom is structured. It looks like the old clichés were true after all: the Catholics finally outbred the Protestants. All those priests, forbidding them sinful, evil contraceptives, urging them to have more and more children, winning this country for the true faith. They’ve got a paper majority already. By 2013 it’ll be a political majority. They reckon by 2020 the position of a hundred years ago will be reversed. It’ll be seventy-thirty Catholic to Protestant. A century to bust Protestant Ulster.
‘And then there’re the Outsiders. They’re real greenfly. We took a full shipload, one hundred thousand. Do you know what the Shian do when they settle a new planet? They breed. Like greenfly. The universe is a big place and even with those light-speed ships of theirs they can’t rely on back-up arriving. They’re on their own, so they make babies. The pioneers are biologically engineered to have multiple births. In a year that hundred thousand is two hundred thousand, next year four hundred thousand, year after that a million. They come out of the womb walking and talking, by the time they’re eight they’re pregnant and the great thing about only having sex twice a year is if you want to get pregnant you are guaranteed to get pregnant. You think Catholics are outbreeding you? The Outsiders are going to bury all of us in bodies. The country’s more than half gone now, between the Catholics and the Outsiders. Everything you’ve done for it, all th
e love and devotion you’ve spent on it, and you still couldn’t keep it safe. How have they done it? With their bodies, and the bodies of their children, and their children’s children. You’re in a state of siege, like Derry’s Walls again, but they keep piling up the bodies against the fortifications and they climb up them, and they keep piling them up and climbing up them, and one day they’re going to pour over the wall like a tidal wave. Their descendants have won it for them. Their children, their immortality. You see, Gavin, in the end their children are going to give them everything they want, and you will have it all taken away because you have nothing to come after you. Abstract principles, political ideals, stirring words and deeds and military glory; they sound mighty fine, but they don’t count. Bodies count. Bodies win. The greenfly take over the world.
‘So tell me Gavin, how does that make you feel? Envious? Angry? Impotent? Don’t you wish you had a big can of that bug spray you were talking about, and you could blow them all away, just wipe them out and have it clean and good and safe again?’
‘Do I have to listen to this clown? What is he talking about? What is he going on about?’
You’ve got him, Littledick. Now all you have to do is reel the poor bastard in.
‘Actually, Gavin, I’ve been bullshitting you. I’m a xenologist. I study Outsiders; what they are, what makes them tick. I’m interested in your church’s attitude to them. Really, I am. They’re just animals, isn’t that what you believe?’
The silence is an indication to Peterson that this question is not rhetorical.
‘You have to understand that there’s a spiritual battle going on,’ Peterson says. ‘These are the end times, when the creatures of Satan will be loosed upon the earth and Satan will dazzle men’s hearts and reign until Christ comes again to overthrow him and establish his kingdom. The devil is the counterfeiter of all God’s work; for God there is the Anti-God, Satan; for Christ there is the Anti-Christ in Rome; for Adam, there is the anti-Adam, the mockery of man.’
Eschatology always gave Roisin Dunbar the creeps. In school the wee over-holy girls had timetabled the end of the world and looked for signs of its close approach and gone around warning everyone that they had better mend their ways should Jesus find them like foolish virgins. A unimpeachable excuse for a shag; the end of the world is nigh, unvirgin me, now.