In the Morning I'll Be Gone (8 page)

McCrabban was relieved but he tried not to show it. Tall, almost stooped, he had filled out a bit since I’d seen him last but his pale skin was just as pale and there was no trace of grey in his hair.

“Temporarily in charge, Sean. They’re supposed to be bringing in a detective inspector in the summer.”

“They always say things like that. If you hang tight you’ll probably get the job.”

Matty had cropped his hedge hair and there was a bit more color in his cheeks. His beak-like nose and prominent teeth were less to the fore in his still-youthful face. He still didn’t look like a peeler but that was OK because he never really wanted to look like one.

“It’s magic to have you back, Sean, in any capacity,” Matty said.

“I heard they stuck you down in some trench in South Armagh,” Crabbie added.

“Aye, they did. They were doing their best to kill me, I think. But I lived to spite the bastards.”

“You have nine lives, Sean,” Matty said.

“Who wants to sneak out to the pub? My shout.”

“Carter keeps us all on a pretty tight leash,” Matty said.

“Come on. What’s the worst that can happen?”

“You would know,” Crabbie said.

We retired to the Royal Oak next door and the boys filled me in on a year’s worth of office gossip and I told them straight out that I was looking for Dermot McCann and I might need their help at some point.

“You’ve to keep it under your hats, lads. It’s a Special Branch op and those nutters are as paranoid as anything,” I said.

Neither of them, I knew, would breathe a word of it.

We had a quick round of drinks and we ran into my old boss, Chief Inspector Brennan (retired), who’d heard I was back and had come by to say hello. He’d always had a tragic Polonian air about him, but now he was old and shabby and his nose was a metro map of capillaries. And worse than all that he was drunk. Drunk at 1:30 in the p.m. He insisted on standing us all a double Johnnie Walker and he told a few inappropriate stories about me and my insolence in the “bad old days.” Eventually he looked at his watch and muttered something about a golf game.

“There goes the ghost of Christmas future,” Matty said.

Murder, suicide, or cirrhosis—those were three of the most popular ways out of the RUC. The lads were depressed now and I walked them back to the station, requisitioned myself a desk, a chair, a lamp, a phone, and a brand spanking new Apple Macintosh computer.

Satisfied with my day’s work I drove home again.

“How was your first day back, Mr. Duffy? I hear Superintendent Carter is a bit of a hard horse,” Mrs. Campbell asked.

“Well, he’s certainly a—”

She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Mrs. Rattigan says his wife left him for a fancy man over the water. Left the bairns too. Boys, I think.”

“Yes, it looks like he has had a couple of trials and—”

“That’s his second wife, of course, his first wife died, car crash,
he
was driving. Three sheets to the wind, they say, although that’s just what I heard.”

“What? Carter killed his wife in a vehicular—”

“Well, I won’t keep you, Mr. Duffy, your phone’s been ringing off and on for the last hour. Someone’s looking for you.”

I went inside, made a cup of tea, put on some nerve-calming Delibes.

I got the phone on the fourth ring.

“How was your first day back?”

“It was fine, Kate,” I told her.

“Have you made any progress locating our friend?”

“Not . . . as such. This was more of a settling-in day.”

“I see.”

“Anything from your end?”

“Nothing. He’s not calling home or sending letters home and there’s no trace of him anywhere. Frankly I’ll admit that it’s got some of us a little rattled.”

“He’s biding his time. When he shows his hand it’s going to be something big. Dermot knows his history. I remember him telling me once that it was the King David Hotel bomb that got the Brits out of Palestine.”

“True. But it was Gandhi who got us out of India a year earlier.”

“Dermot’s no Gandhi,” I said.

“No, he isn’t. So what’s your plan of attack?”

“Nothing special. I’ll just start interviewing people.”

“When?” she pressed me.

“You’re hassling me a wee bit, aren’t you?”

“Because they’re hassling me. We all have our bosses.”

“How about tomorrow? I’ll go up to Derry to see his mum and his sisters, and his uncle’s not a million miles away. They won’t tell me anything, but all I can do is ask.”

“Derry?” she asked.

“Aye.”

“You want me to join you? I’m in Rathlin. It’s not a million miles away either.”

“You live on Rathlin Island?”

“I have a house here. It’s been in the family for a long time and it’s better than sleeping on the base, I can tell you.”

“Don’t you have better things to do than attend a wild-goose chase?”

“Not really, no.”

“Dermot’s mother lives in a bad area. The Ardbo Estate. This will sound dramatic, but I couldn’t guarantee your safety, Kate.”

“I can look after myself.”

I thought about it for a moment. It was always useful to have a partner who could pick things up that you couldn’t. A female partner was even more useful.

“All right. I’ll meet you at the Ballycastle ferry car park at nine. Will that give you time to get over?”

“Yes.”

“See you then.”

I made beans on toast for dinner and watched the TV news.

Things were quiet. A couple of attacks on police stations. A few fire bombs left at shops in Ballymena. It looked like the Libyan boys were still waiting to make their presence felt and I knew they wouldn’t wait forever.

I set the alarm for six, checked under the BMW for bombs, and ran it up the coast to Ballycastle. Driving rain made the road slick and dangerous on the clifftop sections but I kept the Beemer at a quare old clip anyway.

Kate was waiting for me at the Ballycastle ferry car park.

She was wearing a long black wool duffel coat and a black beret tilted to one side. It was fetching. It made her look young. Twenty-something. Fashionable. On her way up.

“You live on Rathlin Island, then, right enough?” I said, pointing across the Irish Sea to the L-shaped island five miles from the mainland.

“Yes.”

“I never met anybody who lived on Rathlin.”

“Well, several hundred people do.”

“Is it not inconvenient for an MI5 agent?”

“Not in the least. There’s a regular ferry service. Phone line. Electricity. Views to die for, of course.”

“And safe too, I imagine,” I said.

“Oh yes. Safe. There hasn’t been a murder on Rathlin in a couple of hundred years. Of course, that was a multiple murder. The massacre of the entire population . . .” she said, and smiled.

“Well, get in. It’s probably best if you don’t say anything. I’ll introduce you as . . . Not sure that I caught your second name?”

“Use my mother’s maiden name. Randall.”

“OK. I’ll say that you’re Detective Constable Randall but if you speak with an English accent the jig will be up.”

“I can do an Irish accent. My father’s old Anglo-Irish gentry.”

I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure you’re great but it’s probably best if you keep your gob closed.”

She got in the car.

“
Your
parents live around here, don’t they?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“We can drop in on them if you want.”

“I don’t want.”

“Gosh, you’re all business, aren’t you?”

“Aye, I’m all business. When I’m on a case I’m on a case.”

I fumbled in my cassette box and put on the B side of
Kind of Blue
.

Miles Davis is usually a way in to someone’s musical background, but Kate didn’t object, hum along, or make any other comment. Instead it was the same intense, stony “I’m just stepping outside for a moment” stiff upper lip.

I wasn’t impressed. She was trying too hard.

We drove along the busy A2 to Portstewart. The rain was elemental and you couldn’t see a thing—a shame, because on a fair day this was the most attractive part of the coast. I kept us on the road through Coleraine and Limavady, where I finally stopped at a little café I knew.

“Are you hungry?” I asked Kate.

“I might be,” she said, looking skeptically at the place, which was just a bog-standard roadside joint.

“They do a mean Ulster fry when Suzanne’s working and you can always tell when Suzanne’s working because her Vincent Black Shadow is parked outside.”

“Is that thing over there a Vincent Black Shadow?”

“Yes.”

“Is the fry the specialty of the house?” Kate asked.

“Aye.”

“I’ll try it, then.”

“My treat,” I insisted.

We went inside. I ordered two Ulster fries and two teas. I grabbed an
Irish News
and a
Newsletter
and we sat in a booth by the window. I read the sports news and Kate the proper news.

Our fries came: potato bread, soda bread, pancakes, eggs, thick pork sausages, fatty bacon, black pudding—all of it pan cooked in beef dripping.

“I don’t think I can eat this,” Kate said.

“And a round of toast!” I yelled to Suzanne.

Kate nibbled at the toast but I needed to get some weight on so I got most of the fry down my neck.

The rain hadn’t let up so we ran out to the car, almost going over into the mud. We drove on and were in Derry just after ten.

For the thousand years before the Normans had come to Ulster late in the twelfth century this had been the territory of the O’Neills, a particularly fierce and independent people. The English settlers had renamed the city Londonderry and survived a famous siege in 1690 by King James’s Catholic armies. After 1690 east of the Foyle had remained a Protestant, English city and west of the river had become Catholic Derry. The city, tragically, had remained divided between Catholic and Protestant ever since. We drove into the Catholic Bogside, which can be an intimidating place for outsiders what with the IRA murals and the maze of estates. Not for me, though, even though I was a peeler and they would have kidnapped and killed me at the drop of a hat. I had gone to school here and I knew the town and its ways inside and out. It was good to be back, in fact. Belfast would never feel like home, but Derry . . . yeah, I could handle Derry.

We drove through the Shantallow Estate with its rows of grey houses, street urchins, bonfires, burnt-out cars, and welcoming AK-47 motifs on every gable. Then it was across the A515 to the Lenamore Road and the Ardbo Estate.

Just a mile from the border with Donegal in the Irish Republic, this place was basically unpoliceable. The RUC and the British Army claimed that there weren’t any no-go areas in Northern Ireland but I’d be surprised if the writ of Queen’s law ran true here.

Unemployment was well over fifty percent and the houses were hastily built low-rise and terraced jobs owned by the biggest landlord in Europe, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Not that that was any kind of a boast. A third of the homes were boarded up or otherwise derelict and the rest were in various states of disrepair. Gangs of children and packs of stray dogs roamed the neighborhoods. Garbage and old clothes lay strewn or stacked in little Charles LeDray–style pyramids. All the trees that had been optimistically planted on the estate were gone to bonfires, and the menagerie you saw through the windscreen included horses and goats, which had been let loose to graze on the landscaping between the brown low-rise tower blocks.

Some kind of empty factory was an eerie red shell to the west, and to the north there was the strange, looming presence of the Donegal mountains.

“If you want to bottle out of this, I can turn us round easily,” I said, seeing the look on her face.

“I’m not remotely worried,” she lied.

Once upon a time this had been a sought-after place to live. A bold, gleaming 1960s slum clearance project, and it had stayed that way for a few years at least. Derry had largely escaped the worst of the Troubles until that fateful day: Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British Army paratroopers had overreacted to reports of an “IRA sniper” and shot dead thirteen unarmed people during a civil rights march.

IRA recruitment had soared overnight, and within months vast tracts of Derry had been effectively ceded to the paramilitaries.

“Look in the glove compartment. There’s an address on a piece of paper. What’s it say?” I asked Kate.

“22H Cowper Street.”

“OK, Cowper Street. I think I know where that is.”

I drove deeper into the Ardbo Estate, through crumbling tower blocks and terraces, until I found Cowper Street. I wasn’t enjoying the look the kids were giving me as I drove my BMW past them. Thirteen-year-old boys with mullets, spiderweb tattoos, and denim jackets who would just love to steal and joyride a car like this.

None of the houses had numbers and I had to drive round the loop twice, which was plenty of time to attract attention. I finally realized that No. 22 was a four-story tower block constructed from cinder blocks and a dirty, slate-colored concrete. Windows had been put in on all the lower floors and graffiti told me that this was the territory of the Irish National Liberation Army—yet another of the many nationalist paramilitary sects.