In the Morning I'll Be Gone (27 page)

“Or maybe even a little before.”

“Right. She gives McPhail, Yeats, and Connor the bum’s rush ’cos she wants to get back home. So why on earth does she decide that she has to change the light bulb that’s been annoying her all evening? I mean, think about it. She has to look for a replacement bulb, she has to turn all the lights off so she doesn’t get electrocuted, she has to bolt and lock the front door. She has to get up on the bar and start fiddling with a dusty old light bulb in the dark that she can barely reach ’cos she’s only five foot two. She does all that instead of just leaving, locking the front door, and rushing home to see how her da’s doing.”

“What are you saying, Crabbie?” I asked him.

“I’m saying that now that I’m sitting here thinking about it I’m not buying it.”

“I’m not selling it.”

“I know you’re not. But the killer is, isn’t he?”

“He certainly is. He wants us to think that an accident happened. That a murder is impossible,” I said.

“This isn’t a sex crime. Nothing’s been stolen. Which poses the question . . . why did he do it? It was something about Lizzie. Had to be.”

“What about her, Crabbie?”

“I don’t know. Something she’d done? Something she knew?”

“I like the way you’re cooking here. Look around you. Was there anywhere he could have been hiding that we might have overlooked?” I asked.

Crabbie considered it and shook his head. “No, Sean, he wasn’t hiding in the pub. He was long gone. If he was careful enough to kill her and make it look like an accident he wouldn’t have taken the risk of hiding in the pub,” Crabbie said.

“My way of thinking too.”

Crabbie took out his pipe and I took out me fags. I borrowed his lighter and sucked down a Marlboro Light.

“Do you know why magicians don’t reveal how they do their tricks?” I asked him.

“Why’s that, Sean?”

“Because the way they do it—twins, misdirection, looking at your card while you’re not looking—is usually so stupid they know you’ll have nothing but contempt for them when you find out. I bet we’re missing something here that’s really stupid and obvious.”

“It’s not obvious to me.”

“Or me . . . yet.”

We sat and smoked for twenty minutes, but even though we were at the scene of the crime, we had two good cop brains and we were lubricated by our tobacco of choice, still illumination did not dawn.

We locked up the pub and walked back through the village to the Fitzpatricks’.

Mary and Annie were home now and we gave them the key and said a quick hello. I introduced McCrabban and I explained what we’d been doing.

Mary asked whether we’d made any progress.

“Unfortunately not,” I said. “But we’re still working on it.”

“I’m glad to see that you’re still working on it,” Mary said, looking at me significantly.

“I’ll keep on it until I’m easy in my mind one way or the other,” I said.

“That’s good,” Mary said.

“Well, we should be off. Jane was asking for you,” I told Annie.

Instead of pleasure a look of jagged annoyance sliced across Annie’s face.

“Asking about me, was she?” she said a little testily.

“In a very nice way,” I insisted.

“She’s overdue, isn’t she? I knew she’d pull something like that. She’s quite the drama queen when all is said and done.”

“Annie! Don’t be ridiculous. She can’t force the baby out!” Mary insisted.

Annie looked at me for support but I wasn’t getting involved in this.

“We should go.”

“Aye, we better get back,” McCrabban agreed, and we hurried out to the Beemer.

“Can you tolerate Radio 3?” I asked him.

“It’s your car, mate. Your rules,” he said.

It was Brahms’s Symphony number 3, which wasn’t that objectionable.

We drove back to Carrickfergus in rare August sunshine. I took us in along the Tongue Loanen through the sheep fields and cow pasture.

We drove to the station along Taylor’s Avenue and the bridge over the railway lines. There was a grubby man standing there next to a Toyota Hilux. He was wearing a green and white Glasgow Celtic bobble hat. There was a lankness about his features. A measured insolence. Something about him that made Crabbie and me both take notice. There was a driver in the Hilux with a ginger beard and in the back of the pick-up something that resembled building materials under a tarp.

A few hours later Crabbie and I were able to give them a description of the two men and the vehicle.

But they never caught them.

They never do.

I went through the checkpoint and parked the Beemer at the rear of the police station in the space near the wall reserved for CID personnel.

The sun was shining. The birds were singing. There hadn’t been a riot for days but Northern Ireland’s stuttering journey to normalcy abruptly came to an end that afternoon with a series of bomb attacks on police stations.

Carrickfergus was an out-of-the-way police barracks. And it was this that had probably saved it from the worst of the Troubles. Everywhere, however, has their time. The reason the USAAF targeted Hiroshima was because it had, up until that point, got off lightly . . .

Crabbie was out of tobacco so we walked down to Sandy Walker’s newsagents. He went inside and I waited for him. There was a nice view of the lough and the castle, and it could have been lovely but for the fact that the tide was out and Downshire beach was littered with its usual modern-art ensemble of plastic bags, shopping trolleys, tires, sewage, and the odd dead sea creature.

Crabbie paid, we walked back to the barracks and went upstairs.

Matty was at the coffee machine talking to a pretty, pale, dark-haired reserve constable I didn’t know. I felt a minor spasm of guilt that I hadn’t got to his letter of recommendation yet, but he hadn’t hassled me about it so maybe he’d had a change of plan.

Matty asked McCrabban and me whether either of us wanted a cup of tea.

“I think we’re all right, mate. And it looks like you’re busy enough,” I said, and winked at Crabbie. “I’ll get on with that letter you wanted, mate.”

“Ta very much,” Matty said.

I went into my office and booted up the Apple, but instead of writing the letter of recommendation I played Beyond Castle Wolfenstein, determined this time to get to the level where I could kill Hitler.

Time ticked.

Death made his way along the lough . . .

I closed my eyes for a moment.

There was an enormous bang and a crash and then two more bangs.

The last mortar landed very close, the percussion wave smashing the windows in my office and throwing me out of my chair into the wall.

Dust was everywhere. Blood in my mouth.

Bomb
, I thought.
No . . . gas explosion
.
No . . . bomb.

I rubbed my eyes and looked at the wrecked room. My chair was on top of the filing cabinet. My desk had been overturned. The window had imploded.

Being in a bombing inside a building is like no experience one has ever had before. The only thing to compare it to is an earthquake. All your certainties have gone. The solid world has collapsed and what is left is fear and awe and the momentary exhilaration of being alive.

Time slows.

Adrenalin spikes.

Hysteria and shock, even among us hardened professionals.

I heard screaming. The ringing of a fire alarm. I got to my feet, steadied myself, and opened my office door. I was surprised at how little damage there had been. Later we learned that only two of the mortars had hit their target and the rest had missed and arced harmlessly into the sea.

The roof had caved in and there was smoke and debris, but there was no fire, and the walls of the station were intact.

“Are you OK?” a man asked me.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“Over here,” he said.

Two uniformed officers were trying to lift a concrete slab off a woman’s smashed legs. I felt absurdly strong and I tried to help, but twenty men wouldn’t have been enough. And it was too late anyway. A girder from the roof had impaled her through the abdomen and she was losing blood by the mugful.

She was crying and someone took her hand.

I sat down for a moment.

Breathed in dust, coughed.

“You’re bleeding,” someone said.

I touched my scalp. It was only a scratch.

“We have to evacuate. Here, let me help you up, sir.”

Outside into the August sun.

Ambulance men came. Firemen came. There was even a helicopter.

A blanket went around my shoulders and sweet tea was pressed into my hands. A girl with blond hair wiped my face. “Drink your tea,” she said. “It’ll make you feel better.”

I drank it and it did make me feel a little better.

I was triaged into a low-priority group and it wasn’t until an hour later that I was taken to the Moyle Hospital in Larne where I got half a dozen stitches in my scalp and a splint on a sprained wrist.

It was in the recovery room of the Moyle surgical ward that I learned that six police stations and four army bases had been targeted that afternoon in a simultaneous assault. The mortars they’d launched at Carrick police station had only ten-pound shells whereas in a similar attack Newry police station had been hit by half a dozen fifty-pounders, just one of which had killed nine policemen and injured thirty-seven.

Carrick police station had suffered only two fatalities. Reserve Constable Heather McClusky and the person she had been talking to at the coffee machine: Detective Constable Matty McBride.

After two days the doctors still didn’t like the swelling on my head and refused to give me permission to attend Matty’s funeral, which meant that I had to sign myself out between nurses’ shifts and get Crabbie to meet me in the hospital car park and drive me to the small churchyard in Magheramorne.

Matty’s father, a Dunkirk veteran and an old-time peeler, gave the eulogy. He talked about Matty’s love of the police and how his son had wanted to bring a better future to everyone in Northern Ireland.

Every cop there knew that all Matty really cared about was fly fishing and girls, and perhaps foolishly he had treated the cops as a civil service job that gave him a lot of time off to drive to the Fermanagh lakes.

My head was on fire at the wake but I managed a couple of jokes and told his father that I was proud of him and that I’d think of Matty every day for the rest of my life.

His old man thanked me and I could see that he was moved.

Crabbie wanted to drive me back to the hospital after the wake but I got him to take me home instead.

Heather McClusky’s funeral was the next day in Ballycarry but my head was throbbing and I was running a fever and I just couldn’t make it. It didn’t matter. Apparently the Chief Constable and the Secretary of State came down for that one.

The IRA attacked more police stations, army bases, and shops in the coming weeks. They used a variety of techniques: mortars, drogue bombs, truck bombs, grenades, and rockets. This, apparently, was the beginning of the Libyan team’s big push. I read in the paper that my old friend, the luxuriantly coiffed Joe Kennedy had exculpated the actual terrorists and blamed all the attacks on the British Army’s continuing presence in Northern Ireland.

Kate called to see whether I was doing OK and I said that I’d need a few weeks to get back in the saddle, which I knew would buy me some time without any pressure.

In other news the miners’ strike across the water was generating increasing chaos for Thatcher’s government, and John DeLorean was acquitted of all charges stemming from his cocaine bust.

I spent some time at home doing nothing, and MI5, to their credit, left me alone. I didn’t really know why they were giving me all this string. Perhaps they were desperate or perhaps I was one of a dozen crazy lines in the stream and they only needed one of them to bite.

I appreciated that they had gone off the reservation to bring me in. And I felt some sense of obligation. But what I didn’t have I didn’t have. I wasn’t going to bang my head against a wall. Magnum PI did that on TV and other cops in books. But few people in the RUC ever banged their head against a wall about a case. We conserved our psychic energy for the day-to-day. We were all too busy trying to stay alive. At Stalingrad no one cheered when the tractor factory finally fell. I knew how they felt. Emotion was a luxury none of us could afford.

In the middle of September I drove to Antrim to talk to Mary Fitzpatrick.

I told her what I had and what I didn’t have.

She listened politely and it wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted definitive answers. I said that I would keep working on it.

Annie was there and she walked me out to my car.

“I heard about what happened at your police station,” she said. “Are you OK?”

“I’m fine.”

“The newspapers say it was the boys from Libya.”

“Maybe. Who knows?”

“If it was Dermot’s cell, then I’m sorry, Sean.”

I nodded and she took my hand.

“I’m glad you’re OK, Sean,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m all right.”

“I’ve got something to tell you. I’ve been thinking about things and I’ve made some decisions.”