In the Morning I'll Be Gone (38 page)

I read the statement that night in the
Evening Standard.

The IRA didn’t realize that luck was a commodity that some of us had and some of us did not.

Thatcher had it. I had it. Dermot did not.

I spent two days in the Royal Sussex County Hospital.

On the evening of the second day I had a visitor. Half a dozen detectives entered before her. Then Kate. Then Douglas Hurd, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Then Mrs. Thatcher herself.

“Is he the one?” she asked Kate.

“Yes,” Kate said.

The prime minister leaned over my bed. “Can you hear me?” she asked.

“I can hear you,” I told her.

“I am in your debt, Inspector Duffy. I owe you a great deal.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Your modesty does you much credit, Inspector Duffy. And I appreciate that the full extent of your heroism will never become public knowledge. But as long as I have any influence over Her Majesty’s Government I will make sure that your name will be mentioned with respect—something that has not always been the case in the recent past.”

Even if I hadn’t been pumped full of drugs I wasn’t sure I would have been able to follow what she was talking about.

Was this that bloody apology I’d wanted?

“How’s Tom? No one’s told me about Tom,” I said.

Kate took that question. “Tom’s at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He broke both his legs, a couple of ribs, and punctured a lung. He’s been very badly burned but he’s recovering and is expected to live.”

Mrs. Thatcher put her hand on my shoulder and leaned over the bed. For one horrifying moment I thought she was going to kiss me on the forehead, but she merely said: “Good luck, Inspector Duffy,” and with that she nodded to her security detail and exited the ward.

When she was gone it began to rain outside.

I thought of the people who hadn’t made it, the people I couldn’t save. I thought about Matty and Reserve Constable Heather McClusky and I thought about Dermot.

And I thought about poor incompetent Tom.

But he had survived.

And that was the great thing, wasn’t it?

To live.

I drove the BMW north through the rain, hugging the coast of Ireland until the land suddenly came to a halt in the wild broken country that had once been the sea bridge between Alba and Hibernia.

I had been home from England three weeks now. Hunkering in my house in Coronation Road. Waiting for a letter or a phone call.

But no one had contacted me. I didn’t know where I stood. I didn’t know anything.

I drove north through Ballypatrick and Ballycastle and Ballintoy.

I parked at the Giant’s Causeway and when the rain cleared off I got out my Walkman, zipped my leather jacket over my hoodie, and went out onto the rocks as far as they would go into the north Atlantic.

It was well after midnight. There were no people, birds, anything.

I could see a few lights from the villages on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland. Nothing else. I sat on one of the hexagonal columns closest to the water and put Led Zeppelin’s
Houses of the Holy
into the player. I fast-forwarded the cassette until I got to “No Quarter.” I burned a little cannabis resin and rubbed it into a roll-up.

I lit it and pulled back my hood. The sky was mirrors. Bleary-eyed stars whose true names and stories we were destined to know nothing of. I drew in the black cannabis. I held it. I let it go. The moon knew. Much she had seen in her four-billion-year ellipse. It would be a long time before she forgave our sacrilege of coming unbidden into her presence in 1969.

I closed my eyes. It was warm. There was an odor of salt and spray. The sea breaking gently on the cape, on this hidden path between the kingdoms.
The path that still exists for those who can truly see.
I lay back on the flat rocks.

“What’ll I do now?” I said aloud to the sea. “What’ll I do now that I have set the world to rights?”

The sea, as always, kept her own counsel. I’ll lie here and offer myself to Lyr, the god of broken water. The cassette ended. The water lapped the stones and the great stave of night had only this one faint note in all that epic silence.

I slept. Dreamed.

Gray light.

Yellow light.

Dawn over Scotland.

I got up and shook the stiffness from my bones and walked to the car.

I drove to Ballycastle and caught the first ferry of the day to Rathlin Island.

I was the sole passenger and the crossing was calm over a strange, milky, phosphorescent sea. We docked on the little stone pier in Church Bay.

I asked directions to Cliffside House. Up along the road toward the West Lighthouse, I was told. I walked the hilly road and found the place. It was at the end of an isolated lane through oak and hazel trees.

I had expected this.

I could hear the ocean all around.

The house was a three-story medieval fortified manor built of massive stones that had been repointed and whitewashed. The gate was a large iron swing bar over a cattle grid. A sign said “Strictly No Trespassing.”

I opened the gate, stepped across the cattle grid, and walked under two massive white oak trees.

The front door was painted red and was Canadian maple four inches thick.

The windows were bulletproofed.

I knocked on a brass knocker shaped like a goat’s head.

“It’s open,” she yelled from inside.

I turned the handle and went in.

I found myself in an eighteenth-century manor house with thick stone walls that were decorated with shields, ancient bows, and claymores.

There was even a harp.

The furniture was wooden, handmade, ancient.

“I’m right at the back of the house, Sean,” she said.

I walked through a small living room, an old-fashioned kitchen, and found myself in an airy modern conservatory. She was sitting on a rattan sofa with her back to me, looking out to sea.

The conservatory window was made of one enormous sheet of curved plate glass. I saw now that we were almost at the edge of the cliff. To the west Malin Head in County Donegal, the northernmost point in all of Ireland, seemed close enough to touch. To the east the Mull of Kintyre in Scotland was even closer. I didn’t know what we were looking at to the north across thirty miles of blue Atlantic Ocean. Islands in the Hebrides? I wasn’t going to ask. I wasn’t here to talk about the view.

She raised herself a little to look at me. Her eyes were green and her hair was cut into a Louise Brooks–style bob. She was wearing jeans, a black sweater, socks.

She could have been anything from twenty-five to fifty-five.

“Have a seat,” she said.

I sat on a leather armchair next to a telescope.

“Would you like some tea?” she asked.

I shook my head.

“What do you want?” she asked.

“I want, I want . . .”

But my voice was flat and weak and the words died.

“I’ll make the tea,” she said.

She got up and went into the kitchen.

I watched a tiny sailing boat cutting west into the impossible expanse of blue sea. I wondered whether the landmass behind the Kintyre peninsula was the Isle of Arran in the Firth of Clyde, where St. Brendan the Navigator had rested before his journey to the New World.

She came back with a teapot wrapped in a handmade cosy.

“Shall I be Mother?” she asked.

“All right.”

“Milk and sugar, isn’t it?” she asked.

I nodded. She poured the milk and sugar into a bone-china teacup and passed it to me on a saucer.

“Thanks,” I said.

I sipped the tea and we sat there saying nothing for a few minutes.

When my tea was done she offered me another cup.

I shook my head.

“Why did you come here, Sean?” she asked.

“I have questions,” I said.

“And you think I’ll have the answers?”

“Aye, I do,” I said.

She folded her hands across her lap.

“Go on, then,” she said.

“What happens next, Kate?”

“For you?”

“For me.”

“Whatever you want to happen, Sean. Do you want to continue your police career?”

I don’t know.

“Why are you keeping Dermot’s name out of the papers? It’s been a month since his death was announced in the Republican press and I haven’t heard his name mentioned once in relation to the Brighton bombing.”

“I imagine that it suits the purpose of Scotland Yard to assume that the bombers are still out there . . .”

“So they can fit someone else up for it?”

“You would know more about the ways of policemen than I.”

I leaned back in the chair and smiled at that.

“The ways of policemen . . .” I said to myself.

She put down her teacup and took my hand. “It’s been a terrible few months for you, hasn’t it? You must be exhausted.”

I nodded. Exhaustion wasn’t the word.

“What’s your real name?” I asked.

“It’s Kate,” she insisted.

“Is it really?”

“Shall I tell you about this house?”

“If you want to.”

“My grandmother’s house. My father was Irish. Of a sort. Didn’t I tell you that?”

“Yes. You did.”

“She had it built over an old fort. She liked the place because of its defensive properties. The walls are two foot thick. There’s an escape tunnel that leads to the cliff path. Quite the character, was my grandmother.”

She smiled and looked through the window.

A tiny sailing ship tacked, freezing in mid-water, before sliding northward across the sea.

“Is my future safe in the RUC? What are you going to tell the chief constable?”

She laughed. “That’s what you’re worried about?”

She leaned across and gave my hand a squeeze. “As long as Margaret Thatcher draws breath no one can touch you, Sean.”

“So I can resume my career in the CID?”

“Anytime you want with any rank you want at any station you want.”

“I was that good, huh?”

“You were that good. You kept history on track.”

I shook my head. “I did nothing. I didn’t stop the bombing. I didn’t prevent those people from being killed . . .”

Kate let go of my hand and shook her head.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said in a half-whisper . . .

“What?”

“You saved her life.”

“Who?”

“The prime minister.”

“How?”

“As soon as you called Tom, he got through to me, and although we didn’t think there could possibly be a bomb, we had to get her out. No fuss. No drama. We woke her and Denis and she and her staff were all across the street when the bomb went off.”

“Jesus!”

“Of course, this information can never be allowed to come out. Everyone has had to sign the Official Secrets Act. This is a deep one. This one has been sealed under the hundred-year rule.”

“But her room was untouched, it wouldn’t have made any difference.”

“Again, that’s the official story. In fact her room was completely destroyed by the bomb. Dermot knew what he was doing. He knew where she had stayed in the past and where she would likely stay again, and he planted his bomb for maximum effect. He knew that her room would be thoroughly searched, but a few floors above . . . Well, they might be a little more lax about that. And as we all know now, sniffer dogs cannot detect Semtex.”

“Tom knew this when I met him at the hotel?”

“Of course. We thought it was bollocks but you don’t think we’re complete idiots, do you?”

Bloody Thatcher. Jesus. Maybe Dermot had had the right idea.

She patted my arm. “As I say, Sean, you kept history on track.”

“For good or ill.”

“For good or ill, indeed, but it’ll go the way it’s supposed to go.”

“And the PM knows it was me.”

“You’ve got the golden ticket, Sean. You can do anything you want; as one of my earthier colleagues said you could fuck the Princess of Wales in the dining room at Balmoral and no one would say boo to you . . . You wouldn’t be the first one either, but that’s another story.”

I sat there for a long time. My tea grew cold.

“Why do you do this? What’s in it for you?” I asked.

“For me personally?”

“For you, for the service, for the Brits? Why?”

She withdrew her hand from mine and folded it back on her lap. She was sitting there with her legs curled underneath her. Feline. Intelligent. Sinister.

“We play the long game,” she said.

“The long game?”

“Yes.”

“What is this long game?”

“Do you study history, Sean?”

“Some.”

“I’ll tell you a little story. After victory in the Franco-Prussian war, an adjutant went to General Von Moltke and told him that his name would ring through the ages with the greatest generals in history, with Napoleon, with Caesar, with Alexander. But Moltke shook his head sadly and explained that he could never be considered a great general because he had ‘never conducted a retreat.’”

“And that’s what you’ve been doing here, is it? Conducting a retreat?”

“That’s what we’ve been doing since the first disasters on the Western Front in the First World War. Conducting as orderly a retreat as possible from the apogee of empire. In most cases we’ve done quite well, in some cases—India, for example—we buggered it.”