The Bloomsday Dead

by Adrian McKinty

  The chief super was about to add something but bit his tongue instead.

  “If that’s what you need, fine,” he said finally.

  Bridget dabbed her eyes, took a sip of water.

  “It is,” Bridget said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me I have to go to the ladies’ room.”

  She got up. A female constable helped her out.

  Moran stood behind me and hauled me to my feet. I would have smacked the fucker but for the presence of the Old Bill. I pushed his hand away from me.

  “Keep your fucking paws off me. Touch me again and you’re a dead man, peelers or no peelers,” I snarled.

  “Yeah, well, you heard the lady. You better pull the cord and get out of here, Forsythe, your services are no longer required,” he said.

  “I have things to do anyway. Don’t be such an asshole.”

  We stared at each other and one of the younger detectives came over.

  “Is there a problem here?”

  “No problem, run along, sonny, the adults are talking,” Moran said.

  The cop couldn’t think of a reply and walked shamefaced back to his colleagues.

  “Ok, Moran. Fine, you’re a big man. Great. It’s not midnight yet. You can tell me this—Bridget’s pretty emotional—was that definitely her? Definitely Siobhan?” I asked him.

  “It was her,” Moran said.

  “And that first voice, have you ever heard it before?”

  “Nope.”

  “It was foreign, wasn’t it? There was something about it,” I said.

  “I told you, I haven’t heard it before. You’re trying my patience, Forsythe. Well, you won’t be trying it for too long. As soon as we get Siobhan back—”

  “Aye, I know. Well, like I say, join the queue, I’m not exactly Mister Popular round these parts.”

  “Price you pay for being a rat murderer,” Moran said.

  Bridget came back into the interview room. She couldn’t stand now. Moran helped her into a chair. She blew her nose. She’d been crying on and off for hours. For days, really, but once again I was struck by her. She was haggard and she was older but she looked extraordinary. Age had only deepened her loveliness. It had removed the rawness of youth and replaced it with an elegance, a charm, a breathless quality. No longer a bubbling champagne. Now a cognac of the first reserve. Smoldering, earthy, vulnerable, pure.

  And in a way, looking at her was like looking in a mirror. We had both done terrible things. We had both changed so much.

  And I saw something else.

  I knew I loved Bridget now. I’d always loved her, from that very first moment, and all through the years and even now when she was trying to kill me. I couldn’t help it. No one could. I could even forgive Darkey White for what he did to us, to me and Scotchy and all the rest. Our lives were worth it, for a chance of happiness with this woman.

  A constable came in with a large briefcase full of money. It brought me back to my senses. Ten million in sterling and international bearer bonds. How much was that in dollars? Was Bridget worth that much? Of course she was. That and much more. She’d have paid fifty million to get Siobhan back. Kidnappers couldn’t be that savvy, then, or they would have known that. Or maybe they did know it, but wanted a sum she could raise quickly. Or perhaps there was more to all this than just the cash.

  “Let’s get you a cup of tea and get you prepped,” the chief super said to Bridget.

  “Ok,” she replied meekly, tired now, close to the edge.

  She was led away by the chief super and one of the female constables. She didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to me. I stood awkwardly for a moment, wondering what to do next. Moran made his presence felt at my arm.

  “Make yourself scarce, Forsythe. We’ll count to a thousand and then we’re coming,” he said. No smile on his face, just those brutal, vengeful eyes.

  “Ok,” I said, stole his cigarettes and lighter from the table, and walked out of the interview room.

  In the corridor I found the constable who’d been doing the trace. He looked keen and amenable; he might do.

  “Listen, mate, I’m a private detective working for Bridget, can you do me a wee solid? I need the address of a Slider McFerrin in Bangor, he might be involved in all of this. I don’t know, but I think he might be the one that stole those phones of yours.”

  “Do you now? Slider what?”

  “McFerrin, he lives in Bangor.”

  “Ok,” he said, but he didn’t rush off to go check it out.

  “Come on, mate, quid pro quo, I gave you the name, tell me his address and I’ll check it out. It might be a dead end, but I promise I’ll give you everything I get,” I said.

  “You’ll give who?”

  “I’ll give you personally.”

  “Fair enough. I’ll see what I can do, hold on there.”

  I took a seat in the corridor and closed the door on the two peelers watching the German porn flick.

  The keen copper came back.

  “Slider McFerrin?” he asked.

  “Aye.”

  “James McFerrin, lives with his ma at 6 Kilroot View Road, Bangor. You think he’s mixed up in this?”

  “He might be.”

  “Well, he’s a player all right.”

  “What can you tell me?

  “I can’t tell you anything. Watch your step, though. Bad family. He’s one of six boys. Eldest was killed by his own side, the ma runs bootleg whiskey, and he’s done time in the Maze for murder, assault, and grievous bodily harm. He was released under the Good Friday Agreement. Nothing about theft, phones or otherwise, but he’s a bad ’un.”

  “Cheers, mate.”

  I walked out into the station car park. It was raining again now. The drains had been blocked up and narrowed to tiny slits so that a terrorist couldn’t crawl into the sewers and blow the police station up from underneath. The car park was flooding and a peeler with a foot pump was trying to get the water out of the bigger potholes. It was a sorry sight.

  “You couldn’t give us a hand there?” the peeler asked, mistaking me for a plainclothes detective.

  “Fuck, no,” I told him.

  I left the cop shop, walked a few blocks, found a taxi stand outside the Ulster Hall. They were just letting out a revival preacher, a Dr. McCoy from the Bob Jones ministry in America. Revival meetings were popular in Belfast. From the airbrushing on his poster, Dr. McCoy seemed a wee bit more suspicious than most, and sure enough, the patrons had been so thoroughly fleeced that no one even had any dough left for a taxi. I skipped to the front of the line.

  The driver of the black cab was glad to see me.

  “Hanging about here for bloody ten minutes,” he complained. “I suppose the rest of your mates are waiting to get beamed up.”

  I got the joke, told him the address in Bangor.

  “I see you’re wearing a Zeppelin T-shirt. Did you know that the Ulster Hall was the very place where Zep played ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the first time?”

  I said I didn’t know, but there was an extra fifty quid in it if he shut up and another fifty if he drove to Bangor like the hounds of hell were after him.

  A wind from the Arctic taking the black smoke from Kilroot Power Station and blowing it down over the bad facsimiles of houses in the dour northern part of Bangor. The shore and the oily sea slinking back into themselves and the smell of burning permeating everything. Ash on clotheslines and whitewashed walls and on almost all the wind-ward-facing surfaces, as if the golden head of the enormous belching chimney top was in some sinister coitus with the dank and cheerless settlement.

  Kids out playing football, older folks sitting in deck chairs, chatting. It was a break in the rain, and in Northern Ireland you used those breaks when you could get them.

  The people were Protestants. I knew this not because they were physically unlike or dressed differently from Catholics—indeed, anyone who says that he can tell a Catholic Irishman from a Protestant Irishman by looking at him is a liar, since a th
ird of all marriages in Ulster are across the sectarian divide. Nah, I knew it because the curbstones had been painted red, white, and blue, there were murals of King Billy at the ends of the street, there was a painted memorial for the battle of the Somme on the side of a house, and the flags flying in this neighborhood were the Scottish saltaire, Old Glory, the Union Jack, the Ulster flag, and the Israeli Star of David. If there were Catholics on this street, they kept bloody quiet about it.

  I knocked on the door of number six.

  A kid answered. About ten, freckles, brown hair, patched sweater, cheeky looking.

  “What do you want?” he asked.

  “I’m looking for Slider.”

  “He’s away,” the kid said.

  “Where is he?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Who does know?”

  “Ma.”

  “Is she home?”

  “She’ll be back in five minutes. Down the shops. Do you want to wait inside?”

  “Well, are you sure that would be ok?”

  “Aye. It’s fine.”

  I followed the kid inside the council house.

  A broken light and a narrow hall filled with a death-trap assortment of toys: skateboards, roller skates, cricket balls. The kid opened a door to the left and I followed him into the living room. Boards on the floor, bare walls, and some kind of grotesque papier-mâché statue in the middle of the room. Another kid, a little younger than the first, adding more wet paper to the statue.

  “What in the name of God is that?” I asked.

  “It’s the fucking pope, what do you think?” the first kid said.

  I looked again. The Holy Father’s head was lying on some old plywood and empty vodka boxes. It was still crude, with black-marker facial hair and possessing only a hastily drawn lopsided grin, instead of the full black-toothed variety that would frighten even the youngest children. Just over six feet high and draped in a white sheet, it looked more like a Klansman than the leader of the Catholic Church.

  “Do you not think it’s any good?” the younger kid asked.

  “What are your names?” I asked the first.

  “I’m Steven, he’s Monkey,” the first kid said.

  “You’re telling me that that’s supposed to be the pope?” I asked Steven, looking at my watch.

  “Aye, it is.”

  “What’s it for?”

  “Are you not from around here?” Steven asked.

  And then I remembered. Of course. The Twelfth of July was coming up. The anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne, when Protestant King William defeated Catholic King James, a victory celebrated every year by burning the pope in effigy.

  The kid looked at me for an answer.

  “No, I’m not from around here.”

  I lit a cigarette and sat down on a ripped leather sofa. The kids demanded a share and so I lit a couple more.

  “Well, what you think of the pope?” Steven asked, smoking expertly.

  What I thought was that that was the whole problem with Protestant ideology in Northern Ireland. They had gotten it all wrong—the way to really preserve a culture was to celebrate and nurture the memory of a glorious defeat, not a famous victory. That’s why Gallipoli, Gettysburg, the Field of Blackbirds, the Alamo became the foundation myths for the Kiwis, the American South, Serbs, and Texas. Every year the Shi’a celebrate a massacre and, of course, Christianity is founded upon an execution.

  “The pope doesn’t have a beard,” I said.

  “See,” Steven told Monkey, shaking his head dramatically and dropping the ash from his cigarette onto the bare floor.

  “What exactly are you saying, wee lad?” Monkey said.

  “I told ya,” Steven said with satisfaction.

  Monkey’s face went through a spasm.

  “You told me he had a beard like Jesus in The Passion.”

  “I did not,” Steven replied indignantly.

  “Did so,” Monkey said, clenching his fists.

  “Not.”

  They had both forgotten I was there. They were about to come to blows and even if they didn’t, they were giving me a bloody headache.

  “Ok, lads, give it a rest. Steven, here’s a fiver, away you go and find your ma for me,” I said.

  The kid took the note and sprinted out into the street. The other wean looked at me suspiciously, puffed on his cigarette, and went back to his work.

  “Are you from America?” he asked after a while.

  “Aye, now I am,” I said.

  “What’s it like out there?” he asked wistfully.

  “Exactly like the movies,” I said.

  The kid nodded. Just as he had suspected.

  “I saw that Beyoncé Knowles the other day at the supermarket. Boy, is she a hottie,” I said.

  “You saw Beyoncé at the supermarket? What was she buying?” the kid asked.

  “She was with Madonna and J.Lo; there was a special on Rice Krispies, they all had their trolleys loaded up.”

  “Beyoncé was getting Rice Krispies?” he asked, impressed.

  “Uh-huh.”

  But before I could build an entire cathedral of lies, the living room door opened and a breathless Steven brought in a plump fifty-year-old woman wearing a Yankees cap, a bright yellow dress with green hoops, and sand-covered Wellington boots. She had the circumspect dark eyes of a sleekit old cow, so I knew I’d have to go careful. Monkey had stubbed his fag in the ashtray, but the woman immediately began sniffing the air. She grabbed Monkey by the ear.

  “Aow,” he said.

  “Have you been smoking, young man?” she asked him.

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t lie to me,” she said, twisting the ear a little more off the vertical.

  “I haven’t, honest.”

  “You better not. Stunts your growth and you’re not shooting up as it is, so you’re not.”

  That was a low blow and both boys knew it. They winced. I stood.

  “Mrs. McFerrin, I was smoking, the boys weren’t smoking, it was me.”

  She looked at the three cigarette ends in the ashtray and eyed me suspiciously.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Well, I wanted to talk to you about some business. . . .” I began.

  “Business, is it? Well, sit down, I’ll go to the kitchen and make some tea.”

  “I don’t have time for tea. I’m in a rush to make a flight,” I said.

  Her eyes narrowed. Her face scrunched up impressively. She looked for a moment like an accordion that had fallen from the cargo hold of a 747.

  “No tea, no business,” she said coldly.

  I had clearly insulted her by declining her hospitality, and that in Ireland was a huge mistake.

  “I would love a cup of tea, if you don’t mind,” I said. She went into the kitchen and I heard the kettle boiling. I looked at my watch. I really had no time for this shit, but I couldn’t beat the information out of her, not in front of her weans. The two kids went back to their pope.

  “Maybe he needs a belt or something,” Monkey said as he looked at the effigy anew.

  “You ever see the pope wear a belt?”

  “What about those ropy belts that monks wear around their cas-socks?”

  “Around their what?” Steven asked, and both boys cracked them-selves up laughing. I didn’t see the funny side of anything right now.

  “Mrs. McFerrin, I have to get going,” I shouted into the kitchen, straining to keep calm.

  She came back in with a teapot and a selection of chocolate biscuits. She poured some tea and I took a biscuit.

  “Well,” she said finally in a whisper. “How much poteen do you want?”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “You’re here to buy poteen, aren’t you?”

  “No, no, I’m not, I’m looking for Slider, my business is with him.”

  “Slider? I wouldn’t have a clue where he is. I haven’t seen him for two days,” she said.

  My hea
rt sank.

  “It’s really important. Slider and I go way back, but you see the thing is, Mrs. McFerrin . . . um, I’ll tell you what it is, I was just at the Ulster Hall there, Dr. McCoy from the States was in town doing a revival, and the thing is, I’ve been born again, but now I’m going back to Beverly Hills. I work over there. And I want to clear all my debts now that I’ve seen the light. You see, I owe Slider a thousand pounds, and I want to pay him before I go.”

  It was a crazy story, but this was a crazy house.

  Greed lit up the fat lady’s face.

  “Well, son, that’s a wonderful thing, you finding the Lord Jesus and everything. But I just don’t know where he is or where he’s been,” she said.

  “Doesn’t he live here?”

  “Not the last wee while; oh, but you know who might know, wee Dinger,” she said.

  “Who’s Dinger?”

  “He’s my youngest; he’s a wee bit, a wee bit, you know, special, that way . . . but Slider looks out for him. Takes him on trips and stuff. He’s been taking him somewhere all this week, just for the run in the car. So Dinger might know.”

  “Where’s Dinger now?” I asked.

  “Where he always is. On the beach,” Steven said.

  “Whereabouts?”

  “He’ll be the only one out there.”

  “Well, it’s been great talking to you, thank you very much, Mrs.—”

  “Houl on a minute, big fella, I get a finder’s fee, don’t I? I told you where Slider is, or at least someone who knows where he is, so that’s five percent. That’s fifty quid,” she demanded. I didn’t want her to kick up a fuss. I give her five tens. She smiled and put it in her pocket. I hope it chokes ya, I said to myself, and went outside to look for the youngest member of the clan.

  The moon unhooking itself from the sea. The first stars. It was the gloaming now. The lingering summer twilight that in Northern Ireland and Scotland can last until nearly midnight at this time of year.

  The tide was out and the sand was wet and freezing. Seaweed on the dunes. A few beached starfish and transparent jellyfish. You could see most of Belfast Lough spread in a big U-shaped curve, and from here in Bangor it was only about twenty miles across the water to Scotland. Tonight with the setting sun illuminating the hills in Galloway it seemed much closer.