In the Morning I'll Be Gone (5 page)

In the wee hours I woke and looked at the aspirin bottle next to me and wondered whether this had been a cowardly, half-hearted suicide attempt.
Cowardly
because I still had my service revolver, which as an ex-policeman I was allowed to keep for up to a year after I’d left the force. That was the way to do it. Point blank with a hollow-point .38 slug straight across the hemispheres.

My guts ached and I walked to Carrick hospital and a surprisingly full waiting room. Lynchian post-midnight bus station characters. The Open University on a black and white TV. A beardy physicist: “Life is a thermodynamic disequilibrium but entropy will take us all in the end . . .”

Yeah.

My guts were killing me so they put me on a drip. The doctor on call said that I would live but that I wasn’t to mix my medicines. He gave me a leaflet on depression. I went home, wrapped the bed sheets around me, and went onto the landing. My newly installed central heating had sprung a leak and the repairman had said that he needed to get a part from Germany to overhaul the whole organ-like apparatus. It would take weeks, he explained, maybe over a month, so I’d rented another paraffin heater and in truth I liked it better. The paraffin heater was my shrine and I bathed in its warmth, its sandalwood aroma, and the light of its magenta moon.

I lay before it and let the hot air wash over me like a blanket.

A long time ago I had killed a man with a heater like this.

No. Was that me? Did such a thing really occur?

Or was it a fragment, a dream . . .

Oarless boats . . . Dream ships . . . The half-light of the wolf’s tail.

Dawn.

I went downstairs.

Rain. Sky the color of a litter box. An army helicopter skimming the dogged brown hills.

I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I was skinny, scabby, pale. My nails were long and dirty. My hair was unkempt, thick, black, with grey above both ears and on the sideburns. I looked like the poster boy for an anti-heroin ad. Not that I’d go that route. Not yet. And speaking of the exotic gifts of the Orient . . . Wasn’t there a . . .

I rummaged in the rubbish bin under the kitchen sink and found a roach with an inch of cannabis still left in it. I made a coffee and topped it with a measure of Black Bush. I went back into the living room, searched among the albums until I got the
Velvet Underground & Nico
. I put on “Venus in Furs,” drank the coffee, lit the roach off the paraffin heater flame, and inhaled. Paraffin. Hashish. John Cale’s viola. Lou Reed’s voice.

Revived somewhat, I went outside and picked up the milk bottles. There was a strange car four doors down on the Coronation Road bend. A white Land Rover Defender with two shadowy figures inside. A man and a woman, she in the driver’s seat. I made a mental note of the car, popped the top off the gold-topped milk, and poured it into my coffee mug. I stared at the car and drank. It began to drizzle from a dishwater sky.

“Jesus is Lord!” another one of my enthused neighbors yelled as a morning greeting. I took a final look at the car, closed the door, and went back into the living room.

As I lay down, Lou Reed sang of weariness and being able to sleep for a thousand years. The music ended, the stylus lifted, moved an inch to the left, and the song began again.

There was a faint creaking sound from outside. Someone at the gate. The post or the paper or—

I grabbed the revolver from my dressing-gown pocket and checked that it was loaded. But somehow I knew that the people in the Land Rover were not going to be terrorist assassins . . .

I heard voices and then a confident rap on the door knocker.

I went into the hall, looked through the fisheye peephole every cop had installed as a necessary precaution.

The man was a tall, balding, slightly harassed-looking guy who would make an ideal “innocent bystander injured in shooting” story for the news. He was wearing a blue suit and his shoes were shined to autistic levels of perfection. He was about twenty-five. The woman was brown haired, pale, thin, grey eyed. Somewhere around thirty. No lipstick, make-up, jewelry. She was wearing a black sweater, a short black skirt, and black low-heeled shoes. She wasn’t pretty, not classically so, but I could see how some men would lose their heads for her (some women too). There was an intensity, a self-possession to her that was uncommon.

I put the .38 back in my dressing-gown pocket and opened the door.

“Mr. Duffy?” the man asked with an English accent.

“Yes.”

“May we come in for a moment?”

For just a sec I wondered whether they were, in fact, a really good hit team. It would be the sort of thing a really good team would do. Ask whether they could come in and when the door was safely closed and your back turned, plug you . . . but they were almost certainly those English Jehovah’s Witnesses that I’d heard everyone complaining about down at the fish and chip shop.

“Aye, go into the living room, just to the right there. Do you want tea?”

Both of them shook their heads. Perhaps, like Mormons, they didn’t drink tea or coffee.

“Are you sure you don’t want any? The kettle’s on,” I shouted.

“No thank you,” the woman said.

I made myself a mug, poured a packet of chocolate digestives onto a plate, and carried it back into the living room.

She had taken the leather chair and he had been relegated to the sofa.

They took a biscuit each. Missionaries didn’t deserve the Velvet Underground so I put on Lou Reed’s fuck-you masterpiece,
Metal Machine Music
, an album of feedback loops and screeching guitars.

“Do we have to have the music?” the man asked.

I nodded. “Of course! In case
they’re
listening,” I said.

“In case who’s listening?” the man wondered.

I pointed vaguely at the sky and put my finger to my lips. I sat down, dipped a chocky biscuit in the tea, and ate.

“So . . . Jehovah,” I said.

“Who?” the man asked, and blinked so slowly you wondered whether Lou Reed had given him a mini-stroke.

I brought the teacup to my lips and nodded at the lass. I looked into her strange pale eyes and suddenly remembered that we had met before.

I froze in mid-drink. You know poker, don’t you? So you know what it’s like when you’re playing Texas hold ’em and you’re sitting there with a three and a five off suit and it’s the big blinds and you’re short stacked and the dealer spreads the flop and it’s a two, a four, and a six . . . and just like that you’ve gone from the shit-box seat to the bird-dog seat in the blink of an eye. The blink of a bloody eye . . .

And now I was feeling slightly foolish sitting here in my dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

“We’ve met, haven’t we?” I said to her.

“I don’t think so,” she said in a refined English accent with an ever so slight foreign echo to it.

I got up and turned off Mr. Reed. “Oh yeah, we’ve met before. Not a hundred yards from here in Victoria Cemetery, in 1982. You left me a note about a case I was working on. You’re MI5, aren’t you?” I said.

Neither of them had any idiosyncrasies that would render them vivid but that was the point, wasn’t it? I had only seen her for a fleeting moment and her hair was a different color, but it was her. The fact that I was right was communicated only by a momentary eye twitch and a slight pursing of the lips.

“Any chance of getting some names?” I asked.

“I’m Tom,” the man claimed.

“And I’m Kate,” the woman claimed.

I took a big gulp of the sweet tea and set it down on the coffee table.

“So, Tom, Kate,” I began. “Exactly how badly are you fucked and why do you think I can help you get un-fucked? There are plenty of coppers. Plenty of good coppers. What is it that I bring to the table? Eh?”

I gave the man a wink and his lip curled in distaste. He didn’t like my new-found pantomime joviality. She, however, smiled. “You bring several things, Sean. First, you’re very good at what you do. Second, we don’t want the man we’re looking for to know that we’re making a special effort to find him; of course, he knows that the police are after him, but if two people like Tom and myself were to go around asking questions . . . Well, that just might set the alarm bells ringing a bit louder than we’d like. And third and most important of all, the
personal
. You actually know the individual that we’re seeking.”

“You went to school with him,” Tom added.

I digested this information. Part two was a half-truth. She and Tom wouldn’t be going around asking questions—they’d have proxies in the RUC or Special Branch to do that. But MI5 were like those English officials in the Raj who could never completely trust their sepoy soldiers. The RUC was leaky and unreliable, whereas I was safely outside the system. I would be grateful to have a job. Grateful and pliant.

I sipped some more tea, had another biscuit, and lit a cigarette. Of course, it was obvious who they were talking about: I had only been to school with one man that MI5 could possibly be interested in and that man was Dermot McCann.

“Mr. Duffy, if I could just suggest a—” Kate began, but I cut her off.

“You see, the thing is, love, I’ve retired. I’d like to help you but you’ve arrived too late. I’m putting the house on the market, I’m selling up, and I’m moving to Spain. I’ve picked out a nice wee spot with a view of the Med and with my RUC pension coming in every month I’ll be sitting pretty.”

“What will you do with your time?” Tom asked.

“Nothing. Relax. Listen to music. Did you know that Haydn wrote one hundred and four symphonies? Who’s heard more than half a dozen of them?”

Kate bit her lip and looked at me benevolently. “Look, Sean, we deeply regret the way you have been treated in the last year.”

“Who’s we?”

“We work for the Security Service, as you intuited,” Kate said.

I was excited now but I let my anger bubble through: “It’s easy to say that you
deeply regret it
but you didn’t actually lift a finger to help me, did you?”

“It wasn’t our purview,” Kate said.

“Or maybe you caused the whole thing, eh? Maybe you’ve done it to get me on the way down and then you chaps swoop in as my saviors from across the sea? If that’s the case, I’m afraid its backfired pretty fucking spectacularly. I’ve moved on. I’ve moved on mentally and spiritually and very soon I’ll have moved on geographically too. I’m done with Northern Ireland and the Troubles and Thatcher and MI5 and this whole disagreeable decade. I’m very happy to take my wee bit of hard-earned scratch and go to Spain,” I said.

Tom looked concerned but after a moment’s thought Kate shook her head.

“I don’t think so,” she said.

I set my teacup on the mantel, stubbed out the cigarette in the dolphin ashtray, and rubbed my chin.

“No, believe me, I’m leaving. I’m like Macavity the fucking Mystery Cat. I’m not here. I’m already gone.”

Kate sighed, waiting for the histrionics to be done with.

I slipped in the dagger. “And if you want me to locate Dermot McCann for you before I go it’s going to come at a very high price.”

Tom was shocked to hear the name
Dermot McCann
so early in the conversation but Kate merely arched an eyebrow.

“What price?” she asked.

And now we had the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. What the hell
did
I want?

“Full reinstatement to the rank of
detective
inspector. Full remission of pay and seniority. My record to be expunged of
any
wrongdoing. A posting to a police station of my choosing. And something else . . .”

“What?” Kate asked.

“An apology for the way I’ve been treated. An apology from the top.”

“The Chief Constable?”

“From Thatcher.”

“From Mrs. Thatcher?” Tom asked, amazed at my chutzpah.

“Well, not from fucking Denis.”

“You must be out of your mind, chum!” Tom exclaimed, his eyes bulging in his head.

“That’s what I want. Take it or fucking leave it.”

“You know we could make things very unpleasant for you,” Tom said.

I got to my feet and got close to him. Practically nose to nose. “No, mate, you don’t want to be starting in with the threats, that’s the wrong tack completely,” I said.

Kate cleared her throat, stood, and brushed imaginary crumbs from her blouse.

“I assume a letter of regret signed by the prime minister would be sufficient?” she asked in a business-like voice.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Well, we’ll have to see what we can do, then, won’t we?” she said.

She waved Tom to his feet.

I saw them to the front door. “We’ll be in touch,” Kate said.

“You better make it soon, love, I hear Valencia is lovely this time of year.”

“Actually, it’s surprisingly inclement,” she said, and walked briskly down the garden path.

Ireland in shades of black and green under the gibbous moon. Ireland under the canopy of grey cloud, under the crow’s wing, under the crow’s wing and the helicopter blade. A night ride over the Lagan valley and the bandit country of South Armagh. The music in my head was Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, which opens with a hesitant syncopated motif evocative of Mahler’s irregular heartbeat . . .