In the Morning I'll Be Gone (4 page)

“McBeth?”

“Aye, I’m all right.”

“Did anybody see where that came from?”

No one had. No one had seen anything and no one knew what the sound had been. Up ahead the two old geezers were still talking.

The question was how long we should remain lying here. We couldn’t hug the tarmac all day. “OK, Pike, McBeth, McCourt, get over to the left-hand side of the road and scan those bloody hills. If you see a scope glint or a puff of smoke shoot it. The rest of you, let’s retire by half-squad at three-quarter pace up the road. When we’re a hundred meters past them, we’ll stop and cover them. Everybody clear?”

“Yes, Sergeant Duffy!” several—but not all—of them said.

Pike, McBeth and McCourt ran to the ditch on the Irish Republic side and pointed their machine guns at the hills. Of course, if it
was
a sniper he’d be concealed and thousands of feet away and the effective range of the Sterling was a hundred feet max, but if the three of them blazed away together they might hit something.

The rest of us got to our feet and ran up the road. We stopped and let Pike and his mates reach us.

We did this twice more until we reached the station.

No one shot at us. If it was a sniper, he was a very cautious one. One shot and then done. We patrolled this road every day. His opportunity would come again.

I let every man in the squad go into the barracks ahead of me and then I went in last. I didn’t completely relax until the thick iron gates closed behind me. As usual I was utterly exhausted when I walked through the double doors of the locker room, but the bastards didn’t even give me a chance to get my body armor off . . .

The bastards were two tall, humorless, plain-clothed goons from Internal Affairs. They were wearing old-fashioned black woolen sports jackets over white shirts and matching red ties. One had a ginger peeler tache, the other a black one.

“Sergeant Duffy?” Ginger Tache asked in a vague Scottish accent.

“Yes?”

“Come up with us to Interview Room 2,” he said.

“Can you hold on a minute?” I said, and made them wait while I took off my kit.

I followed them along the concrete corridor to the interrogation room, normally reserved for suspects. They were in there with Constable Jimmy McFaul. Jimmy had evidently spilled his guts about something because there were tears in his eyes and he couldn’t look at me.

I had no idea what this could be about. The cannabis I had lifted from the evidence room in Carrickfergus? But that was a long time ago and what had Jimmy to do with that?

“Have a seat, Duffy,” Ginger Tache said.

“Can I get a drink? I’ve been on foot patrol along the border. Thirsty work, but you proud boys in Internal Affairs wouldn’t know about that, would you?” I said, and went back outside, got a can of Coke from the machine, and put it against my forehead. I popped the can, took a big drink, and joined them again.

I sat next to McFaul. “What’s going on, Jimmy?” I asked him.

His eyes were fixed on his boots.

“Were you driving a police Land Rover on the Lower Island Road, Ballycarry, at approximately nine forty-five p.m. on the night of 20 December?” Black Tache asked.

“What?”

“You were the only Land Rover on the road that night. There’s no point in denying it,” Ginger Tache added.

“Your mate has told us everything. You were on the road and you were driving and you hit someone and you didn’t stop,” the other goon said.

“Jimmy, you said
I
was driving?” I asked him.

Jimmy said nothing and kept looking at the space where his lying eyes intersected with the floor.

“You hit someone, Duffy. From what Constable McFaul says you didn’t even realize it, but you hit a man,” Black Tache said.

“Is he OK?” I asked.

“You knocked him into the sheugh with the wing mirror. He was shook up and he broke a finger, but he’ll live. Twenty-year-old lad on his way back home from football practice. He had his rucksack on his back. You hit that. That’s maybe what saved him from a more serious injury.”

“Thank God for that,” I said.

“He’s still going to sue us, though, isn’t he?” Ginger Tache said.

“I don’t know what the Ghost of Fuck-ups Past here has told you but I wasn’t driving that night. I was in the back of the Rover trying to stop Sergeant McGivvin from choking on his own vomit or puking on my green union suit. Sergeant McGivvin will verify that.”

“We’ve already asked him. Sergeant McGivvin doesn’t remember anything of the incident,” Black Tache insisted with a sleekit smile. “So, it’s just your word against Constable McFaul.”

I nodded.
So that was how it was going to be.

“Both of you are hereby suspended without pay until the conclusion of this inquiry,” the big Scottish bastard said.

“You can keep your gun for personal protection, but you are not permitted to leave Northern Ireland and you are
not
to report for duty,” Goon No. 2 added.

Jimmy accepted the verdict and slunk out of the interview room. He had got his story in first. He was the grass and I was going to be the fall guy. In other words I was completely screwed. Ginger Tache sat down in Jimmy’s seat. “I’m Chief Inspector Slater,” he said, offering me his hand.

I didn’t shake it. I knew this game of old. First the stick, then the carrot up the arse. “What’s all this about?” I asked. “Just tell me the bottom line.”

“The bottom line? It’s over for you, Duffy. You are not being graded on a friendly curve. You should see your file, mate. Christ on a bike. It’s got red flags all over it. You were lucky not to have been kicked out in ’82. You’ve been on probation ever since,” Slater said.

“I wasn’t driving the Land Rover,” I said.

“What do we care? You’re our boy for this month. A nice juicy sergeant. All we need is our quota and you’re it,” Slater said.

“I wasn’t driving!” I insisted.

“Your mate Jimmy says you were. He’s clean and we’ve got your dirty, dirty file clogging up the works.”

I lit a ciggie. “So it’s all been settled, then, has it? I’m the scapegoat?”

“You’ve been in the RUC, what, eight years?” Slater asked.

“Closer to nine,” I told him.

Slater leaned in toward me and smiled an ugly yellow-fanged grin. “It doesn’t have to end in scandal, does it?” he said.

“OK, give it to me. What’s the deal?” I asked.

“You’re not eligible for a pension or benefits but we’ll give them to you if you accept full responsibility and quietly resign without this becoming a big deal.”

“And if I don’t resign?” I asked.

Slater made the throat-slitting gesture. “Full disciplinary proceedings. Make no mistake: you will be found guilty and you will be dismissed from the force without severance or a pension. And don’t think being a Fenian will save you. In your short, not so brilliant career you’ve managed to piss off a lot of people.”

I nodded, stubbed out my cigarette on the desk, and got to my feet.

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

The New Year. 1984. But there was no Big Brother watching us. No one gave a pig’s arse. Ireland was an island floating somewhere in the Atlantic that all sensible people wanted to drift even farther away, beyond their shores, beyond their imaginations . . .

The year limped in. The days merged. One morning it was sleet, the next rain.

I walked the town and when I got home I checked the post to see whether my dismissal papers had come through for me to sign. Carrickfergus was a mess: large areas had been zoned for demolition and reconstruction. It was EEC money and the locals saw it as a good thing, but it wasn’t because it only meant that we were high on the EEC list of Towns That Are in the Shitter.

I walked the streets and drank in the pub and watched TV late into the night, when it was all public information films warning kids about the dangers of drowning in quarries or lifting up strange packages that were really trip-wired explosives.

One night the elderly woman across the terrace had some kind of seizure and started screaming, “He’s coming! He’s coming!” Who was coming was never explained, but she had proclaimed it in such a convincing way that a minor panic had ensued and the whole of Coronation Road had come out.

Another night we heard a two-thousand-pound bomb in Belfast so clearly that it might have been at the end of the street.

Signs, portents, single magpies, black cats, bombs, bomb scares, helicopter traffic . . .

Finally one morning a white envelope sitting on the hall mat.

I took it to the living room and stirred the embers in the fireplace. I lit a fag, took a deep breath, and ripped it open. A boilerplate full “confession” to be signed, notarized, and returned to RUC Headquarters in Belfast.

The terms were comparatively generous. In recompense for an admission of wrongdoing I would take early retirement and receive a pension, although I hadn’t put in enough time.

I read through the document twice, poured myself an emergency Glenfiddich, and signed everything that needed to be signed.

At nine I went into Carrickfergus and found Sammy McGuinn, my barber, who was also a notary public. Sammy was the town’s only communist and it was he who had turned me on to the strange delights of Radio Albania. He read the document and shook his head. “I know you don’t see it now, Sean, but this is a very good thing. As a member of the police you were nothing more than a lackey in a tyrannical government oppressing the will of the people. A Catholic too! Smart lad like you.”

“It was a job, Sammy. A job I was good at.”

“Power is bad for the soul!” he said, and went on to talk about Lord Acton, Jurgen Habermas, and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

“Yeah, could you just notarize the form for me, Sammy?”

“Of course,” he said and added his seal and signature while muttering something about Thatcher and Pinochet.

“I can see you’re down, I’ll throw in a haircut,” he said, and put on the happiest music he could think of, which was Mozart’s symphony number 40.

Mrs. Campbell saw me coming out of the barber’s: “In getting your hair done, Mr. Duffy?”

“I don’t get me hair ‘done.’ I get it cut,” I replied dourly.

I crossed the street to the post office, bought a first-class stamp, fixed it to the return envelope, mailed the letter, and just like that I was off the force.

Time moved on. Days to weeks. Weeks to months. Cold February. Damp March. As Ezra Pound says, life goes by like a field mouse, not even shaking the grass. Usually I went to the library and read the papers: parochial news, fossilized editorials, a narrow frame of reference. I sometimes checked out classical LPs and did nothing until six o’clock when it was seemly to get quietly hammered on Polish vodka or County Antrim poteen, listening to Wagner or Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. Strange millennial music for strange millennial times.

I went to the dole office and they told me that there was no point signing on. With my retirement money coming in I would be means tested and would not be eligible for any other kind of income support. The unemployment officer told me I should move to Spain or Greece or Thailand or someplace where my monthly check from the RUC would go a long way.

I felt that this was good advice and I got a few books on Spain out of the library.

I walked the streets. Observed. Observed like a detective. Kids playing football. Kids painting death’s-head murals on gable walls. Fiddle players and cellists outside the bank busking for coppers. Men in the High Street offering to recite you any poem you could think of for the price of a cup of tea.

One evening in the pub I got into a fight. Standard fare. Old geezer bumped me. I said excuse me, pal. Out came the fisticuffs. I got him with a left and before I knew what was happening the bastard had jabbed me five times with his right. Chin, stomach, kidneys, stomach again . . . He must have been sixty if he was a day. He helped me to my feet and bought me a drink and spun me a yarn about winning a middleweight belt and training John Wayne for his performance as an ex-boxer in
The Quiet Man
. It was a likely story but I was so addled I couldn’t tell whether it was legit or bollocks . . . I went home in a taxi, drank a vodka gimlet, took 10 mg of Valium, half a dozen aspirin and went to bed.