I Hear the Sirens in the Street

by Adrian McKinty

  The hearing convened in a civil service building in the centre of Belfast. The board was made up of old men. Their faces grey, their noses blue. They had joined the police during or perhaps just after the war, and the RUC back then was a different animal: a Protestant force for a Protestant people. The timing of the hearing made me more than a little nervous, for they had picked a moment when the story could be buried. The Argentinians were on the verge of surrendering in The Falklands. Scotland, England and Northern Ireland all had teams in the World Cup. Nobody would waste that much ink about a former hero now disgraced. They could fuck me up or let me off without anyone giving a damn.

  The case against me was read out by a sleekit-looking chief inspector from the internal affairs unit. The meat of the O’Rourke case was barely mentioned at all. The only evidence the tribunal seemed interested in was what particular orders I had disobeyed and whether I had correctly followed RUC procedures. It was pure chicken shit.

  And it dawned on me that this punishment was coming not from Belfast or London but from Washington, DC.

  I had pissed off the Americans, and the Americans wanted to see me punished.

  The old men on the board listened to the case against me, heard my defence, read their notes and retired to consider what should be done with me.

  I waited.

  The room was stuffy, but no one thought to open a window. The panel clearly were not going to be away for very long – and sure enough, they came back in after a pro forma fifteen minutes.

  Chief Superintendent Pullman called my name. My RUC counsel gave me a nudge, which meant that I should stand. I stood to attention. My thumbs pointing down along the seam of my trousers. My heels together. My gaze steady. My dress uniform spic and span.

  Chief Superintendent Pullman shuffled his papers, cleared his throat and read the verdict: “Detective Inspector Duffy, after long and careful deliberation, this tribunal has found that you have committed four separate breaches of the RUC code of conduct…”

  The stenographer began recording my various infractions. She knew it was chicken shit, too. I mean, until very recently they were still beating suspects with rubber hoses down the Castlereagh Holding Centre – they couldn’t talk to me about breaches of their fucking code of conduct.

  “You have disobeyed direct orders on several occasions. You have embarrassed the force on foreign soil …” Pullman continued.

  Embarrassed the RUC? Our name is mud in America. Read the Boston Herald some time, mate.

  Pullman continued talking. His lips moved, the other men nodded, I looked at them with contempt. Old men. Stupid men.

  “… In conclusion, Inspector Duffy, it is with great regret that we must inform you of the unanimous judgement of this disciplinary panel.”

  I swallowed and looked at a crack on the back wall.

  “Effective immediately, you will be reduced to the rank of sergeant.”

  Shit.

  “Back-dated to January first, 1982, your accumulated leave, personal days and other benefits will be similarly reduced to the benefits accruing to a sergeant.”

  Shit.

  Okay so it was bad. I’d lost a rank. But if they let me stay in Carrickfergus I’d still get to lead a team of detectives. Maybe if I kept my nose clean for a year they’d quietly bump me up again to inspector. And if they posted me to a big station in Belfast, a DS could get himself involved in some of the more interesting cases …

  Pullman took off his glasses and stared at me.

  “Do you understand and accept the verdict of this tribunal?”

  I was expected to respond in full for the benefit of the stenographer.

  “Yes, sir, I am being demoted to the rank of detective sergeant with full loss of seniority and remission, sir!”

  Pullman looked up at me with surprise.

  “No, Duffy, you’ve misunderstood – you are being demoted to a sergeant in ordinary. You are being removed from the CID lists.”

  My knees buckled.

  An ordinary sergeant? I wasn’t going to be a detective?

  A regular copper? A regular copper was little people. A regular copper was nothing.

  I sat down again.

  My lawyer looked at me to see if I was all right. He passed me the glass of water when he saw that I was not.

  “Do you understand the verdict, Sergeant Duffy?” Pullman said.

  “Drink this,” my lawyer whispered.

  I got back up and returned Pullman’s gaze right into his ugly mug.

  “No, I don’t bloody understand it! This is bollocks! Have you any idea what it’s like out there? Have you any idea what it’s like to be out there on the line every day of your fucking life?”

  Pullman shook his head at the stenographer who immediately stopped typing.

  “Duffy, we appreciate your service and we take these measures with great regret. But you have embarrassed the name of the—”

  “Fuck your regret and fuck all of you! And make sure you write that down, love,” I said.

  I clicked my heels together, saluted and stormed out of the room.

  They had a car for me but I went home by myself on the train.

  It was full of school kids and I had to stand, enraged, the whole way. I got off at Downshire Halt and made for the off licence. I bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s and a six-pack of Bass.

  I walked up Victoria Road.

  “Oh, you look very nice, all dressed up,” Mrs Bridewell said, pushing a pram.

  “Thanks,” I replied curtly.

  I went into 113 Coronation Road, searched through my records and put on “Hellhound On My Trail” by Robert Johnson.

  I ripped the uniform off my body and threw the police medal against the wall.

  It bounced and nearly landed on the turntable.

  I popped the first can of Bass.

  “A sergeant in ordinary! I’ll fucking resign first. That’ll show you, you fucks,” I said.

  The phone was ringing.

  The first of many phone calls: McCrabban, Matty, Sergeant Quinn, Tony, Inspector McCallister, even Chief Inspector Brennan, who was slap in the middle of messy divorce proceedings.

  They had all heard. They talked to me like there was a death in the family.

  I called my parents.

  My dad said I should resign. All the bright people were leaving Northern Ireland for England and America. I had so much potential. I was wasted in the sectarian, poisoned atmosphere of the RUC …

  I drank and listened to the blues and at nine put on the BBC.

  Port Stanley had fallen to the British forces.

  The Argentinians were formalising a surrender.

  The BBC correspondent was ecstatic: “There is jubilation here in the streets of Port Stanley as the Falkland Islands flag once again rises above the Governor’s—”

  I turned off the box and sat in the silence with the Jack Daniel’s.

  Just before midnight the phone rang again and I picked it up.

  “It could have been worse, Duffy,” a female voice said.

  It was her. Little Miss Anonymous. She who had caused me so much trouble.

  “Could it have been worse?” I said.

  “Oh, very much worse. The Americans are terribly cross with you.”

  “The Americans say jump and you ask how high.”

  “Quite.”

  “Why did you do it? Why did you pick on me?”

  “I was trying to help you, Duffy.”

  “You set me up. Why didn’t you go to America, love? Why didn’t you look in that safe deposit box?”

  “That wasn’t my scene. Not my scene, at all, Duffy.”

  “No, but you sent me, didn’t you? Turned me round and pointed me in the right direction. Did you know what was going to happen when I went to that bank?”

  “Of course not. We wouldn’t have done that to a friend.”

  “Who do you work for? MI5? I already have friends in fucking MI5.”

  “Look … Duffy, or c
an I call you Sean?”

  “Don’t call me anything! Don’t call me again! I’m hanging up on you.”

  “Wait! Wait a minute. As you well know, Sean, life is cheap in Northern Ireland, so why is it, do you think, that you have been allowed to live after all the trouble that you’ve caused for us and our allies across the sea?”

  “Why don’t you fucking tell me?”

  “I have no idea. I can only imagine that to the powers that be, you are, as yet, of some value. Some of us play the long game, Sean.”

  “This isn’t a game,” I said, and hung up the phone and pulled the jack out of the wall.

  I went to the kitchen and wrote out a hasty letter of resignation.

  I stuck it in an envelope and addressed it. I found a stamp and walked to the post-box at the end of Coronation Road. I stood there for a minute, thinking.

  “Best to sleep on it,” I finally decided, put the envelope in my jacket pocket and returned home.

  EPILOGUE: A FOOT PATROL THROUGH THE ABYSS

  Images from the asymmetric wars of the future: curling pigtails of smoke from hijacked cars, Army helicopters hovering above a city like mosquitoes over a water hole, heavily armed soldiers and policemen walking in single file on both sides of a residential street …

  Night is falling.

  The sky is the colour of porter.

  The soldiers are carrying semi-automatic SLR rifles and wearing full body armour. We, the embedded cops, are wearing flak jackets and carrying Sterling submachine guns.

  We are watching windows and rooftops. We are spaced well apart so that a bomb or a rocket-propelled grenade cannot kill all of us.

  Every hundred metres the pointman alternates. Every dozen paces or so the man at the rear does a one-eighty and walks backwards for a step or two.

  Even we seasoned veterans are pumping adrenalin. The street is full of civilians and any one of them could be a watcher for an IRA button man, ready to detonate a booby trap under a car or dug into a road culvert. There could be unseen assassins waiting behind windows and doors with sniper rifles or anti-tank rockets.

  Is this what the squaddies signed on for? These British soldiers who were brought up on Zulu and The Longest Day.

  This is the way it’s going to be from now on.

  Wars in cities.

  Wars with civilians all around.

  Make one mistake and you’re dead.

  Make another kind of mistake and you’re on the TV news.

  We walk through the maze of red-bricked terraced houses off the Falls Road. This part of West Belfast that has been ruined by endemic conflict and economic catastrophe and suicide martyr cult.

  Bomb sites. Waste ground. Helicopters throwing up dust from pulverized brick and stone.

  Recall the noise boots make on cobbles. Recall the eyes watching you. Recall the fear.

  Recall the sights: the scene of a notorious ambush, the graffiti proclaiming death to enemies of the IRA, a bonfire in the middle of a street.

  At a road junction a cat has been shoved into a birdcage. A young private hesitates and turns to look at his commanding officer. He wants to save the cat but everyone shakes their head at him. It could so easily be a booby trap. Such things and worse have been done in the past.

  People jeer as we walk by.

  Others make throat-cutting gestures.

  I thought that my days of foot patrols were behind me. Already the sweat is pouring down my thighs. A kid playing kerby with a soccer ball catches my eye.

  “Bang, bang, you’re dead,” he mouths at me.

  I fake a bullet in my gut and he grins.

  Hearts and minds.

  One heart and one mind.

  The patrols turns on Divis Drive.

  It’s getting dark now. The sun has set behind the Knockagh. It’s cold. Later they say it might snow. We’re now at Reilig Bhaile an Mhuilinn, as the Republicans call it. Mill Town Cemetery, to you and me.

  This is where the IRA buries its dead.

  “Let’s take a look through the graveyard, lads,” the commanding officer says. He’s a Scot from Edinburgh. A boy really. Fresh out of Sandhurst. Must be twenty or twenty-one. A young officer of the Black Watch. My life completely in the hands of a green lieutenant walking through a city he doesn’t know, on his first or possibly second combat patrol.

  We cross the Falls Road in single file.

  The traffic waits for us.

  We walk through the cemetery gates. An experienced staff sergeant whispers something to the lieutenant. The lieutenant grins and nods, agreeing to the sergeant’s suggestion.

  I look at the other two policemen on patrol with me. They shrug. They have no idea what the squaddies are up to either.

  The patrol makes straight for the Republican Plot. The graves of all the IRA men and women who have died for Ireland.

  We reach the final resting place of Bobby Sands. The martyr in chief. The IRA commander in the Long Kesh prison who starved himself to death over sixty-six days.

  The sergeant takes something from a pocket underneath his Kevlar jacket and leaves it on the marble headstone.

  It is a packet of digestive biscuits.

  The soldiers laugh.

  The other policemen and myself do not.

  Later …

  A drive to Carrickfergus through sleet and rain. I go inside and cook sausages. I pour myself a glass of Islay whisky. I eat and drink and doze in front of the TV.

  Suddenly the power flickers and goes out. I wait, but the lights don’t come back on. The IRA has undoubtedly blown up the high tension lines or a substation.

  I sit in the dark drinking the peaty, smoky, pungent, almost painfully good whisky. I get bored and put batteries in the shortwave. I tune in Radio Albania, my old favourite. Dramatic piano music blares from my stereo speakers. The music ends abruptly and an announcer with an American accent continues the news bulletin in mid-sentence: “… production levels. Comrade Inver Hoxha met with a delegation of workers’ soviets and praised them for their three-fold increase in steel output.”

  Later …

  I stoke the fire and lie under a duvet, listening to the sounds of the outside: babies gurning, kids yelling, peelers racing along the top road, Army choppers clipping menacingly over the black water …

  “I hate your drunken face!” a woman shouts over the back to backs.

  “I hate yours more!” a man responds.

  I put the sofa cushion over my head. And then finally there is quiet …

  The TV buzzes into life at seven in the morning with the news that John DeLorean has been arrested for cocaine smuggling. DeLorean apparently thought he could sell a vast quantity of cocaine in Ireland as a way to save his ailing car company, but the whole thing was an FBI sting operation.

  “The bloody F bloody B bloody I.”

  I sit closer to the TV.

  The DeLorean factory in Belfast has suspended operations. Three thousand workers are being laid off immediately with the effect that the unemployment rate in Belfast is going up to twenty per cent.

  Men are filing out of the factory gates looking utterly bereft.

  One commentator says that this marks the end of Northern Ireland as a manufacturing centre.

  “Maybe the end of the province itself!” another reporter agrees.

  A guy from the union comes on the tube and promises riots and demonstrations. Later that morning we get a message that leave is being cancelled. But in the end there are no riots because the unions are weak and the workers are weak and the real power in this land belongs to the men with guns.

  The small crowd outside the Dunmurry plant chants “We want jobs! We want jobs!” over and over for the cameras; but eventually even they are sent scurrying inside by the bitter rain from a big storm-front which has stalled in its inexorable eastward progress and which is destined to remain over Belfast for a long, long time.

  ABOUT … Adrian McKinty

  Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Nort
hern Ireland. After studying philosophy at Oxford University, he emigrated to New York City where he lived in Harlem for seven years, working in bars, bookstores, building sites and finally the basement stacks of the Columbia University Medical School Library in Washington Heights.

  In 2000 he moved to Denver, Colorado where he taught high school English and started writing fiction in earnest. His first full-length novel Dead I Well May Be was shortlisted for the 2004 Ian Fleming Steel Dagger Award and was picked by Booklist as one of the ten best crime novels of the year. The sequel to that book, The Dead Yard, was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the twelve best novels of 2006 and won the Audie Award for best mystery or thriller. These two novels, along with The Bloomsday Dead, form the DEAD trilogy of novels, starring hitman Michael Forsythe.

  In mid 2008 Adrian moved to St Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with his wife and children. His book Fifty Grand won the 2010 Spinetingler Award and his novel Falling Glass was longlisted for Theakston’s Crime Novel of the Year.

  The first of his Sean Duffy thrillers, The Cold Cold Ground, was published in 2012. The third volume, And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone, will appear in 2014.

  Visit Adrian’s blog at http://adrianmckinty.blogspot.com/

  Read the first chapter of

  And In the Morning I’ll Be Gone

  the third volume in the Sean Duffy series

  1: THE GREAT ESCAPE

  The beeper began to whine at 4.27 p.m. on Wednesday the 25th September, 1983. It was repeating a shrill C sharp at four second intervals, which meant (for those of us who had bothered to read the manual) that it was a Class 1 emergency. This was a general alert being sent to every off-duty policeman, police reservist and soldier in Northern Ireland. There were only five Class 1 emergencies and three of them were a Soviet nuclear strike, a Soviet invasion and what the civil servants who wrote the manual had nonchalantly called “an extra-terrestrial trespass”.

  So you’d think that I would have dashed across the room, grabbed the beeper and run with a mounting sense of panic to the nearest telephone. You’d have thought wrong.