In the Morning I'll Be Gone (9 page)

I parked the BMW outside No. 22, got out, and waited for the pack of kids to approach.

“Say nothing,” I mouthed to Kate. “And try not to make eye contact.”

“I
live
here, Sean. You’re treating me like I’m a green lieutenant on his first tour of duty in Vietnam.”

“This isn’t Rathlin Island, love. Just do as I say, OK?”

The roving gang of boys approached.

I gave two pound coins to the tallest and meanest of them, who was going with the skinhead/denim jacket/hobnail boot look and who happened to be carrying a piece of wood with a nail sticking out the end of it.

“There’s ten quid more in it for you when I get back, if, and only if, there’s not a scratch on this vehicle,” I told him.

He sized me up and nodded. “Aye, I’ll fucking see to it,” he said.

I thought it was about a fifty-fifty shot whether he’d steal it or guard it.

“All right, let’s go,” I said to Kate.

There was a slight twitch to her lip, which might have been the first sign of nervousness she had exercised that day.

“The Francis Hughes Hunger Striker and Resistance Fighter Memorial Block,” No. 22 Cowper grandly called itself.

Over the entrance there was a massive graffiti mural of a paramilitary gunman holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and an Irish tricolor in the other as he led an assorted group of refugees through an apocalyptic landscape. It was actually rather good, rising above the naive primitivism of most gable murals to become something that was convincingly terrifying.

I went inside, holding my nose against the stench of urine.

I found a heavily graffitied floor plan and saw that 4H was a corner flat on the fourth floor.

I walked jauntily toward the lift. My years of police training were not required to ascertain whether it worked or not. The elevator shaft was a gaping hole with smashed machinery, garbage, and a pram lying at the bottom of it. If there’d been a live or dead baby in the pram I wouldn’t have been surprised.

We found the stairs and walked to the fourth floor. The architect had assumed that the stairs would be seldom used, for they were narrow and dimly lit through broken windows. They stank of vomit, beer, rotting leaves, and garbage. The occasional black, shoe-sized stain was not the mold I first suspected but, in fact, dead, decaying Norwegian rats.

Kate had the sense not to say “charming” or anything like that. This transcended her acute English sense of irony.

We got to level four and took a breather.

“Are you quite sure MI5 is intercepting the mail for this place? Services seem pretty basic around here to me,” I said to her.

“If this is Dermot’s mother’s place, I can assure you that we’re reading her post and tapping her phones.”

“If you say so,” I muttered, and wondered what MI5 agent would have the balls to come out here to INLA central, break into Mrs. McCann’s flat, and install a phone bug—if indeed that was how you installed a phone bug.

We walked along a dank, dark corridor and knocked on the door of flat 4H.

“Who is it?” a woman asked.

“Police,” I said.

“Fuck off!” the woman said.

“It’s about Dermot,” I said.

There was a pause and some discussion and finally the door opened. Dermot’s ma, Maureen, was slight, about five one or two, a fragile wisp of a thing with her hair in a greying black bob. Her eyes were hazel, her lips red, her skin like grease paper. I’d seen screen vampires with more color in their cheeks. She was in her fifties now and clearly she didn’t remember me, although I’d been to Dermot’s old house in Creggy Terrace half a dozen times when I’d been a kid.

“What about him?” Maureen asked.

“Could I come in, Mrs. McCann?”

“What about Dermot? Is he dead? Have youse topped him?”

“No. We haven’t. Can I come in?”

“Are you the police right enough?”

I showed her my warrant card.

“I’ll give you five minutes of my time and not a minute more.”

We went inside.

The flat was large, tidy, and well maintained, but stank of cigarette smoke, booze and quiet desperation. There was a spectacular prospect to the northeast of Donegal, Derry City, and Lough Foyle.

“Who is it, Ma?” Fiona McCann said from behind an ironing board in the kitchen.

Fiona was two years older than me, and I remembered her from my visits to Dermot’s old house. Back then she’d been extremely beautiful in a way that other Derry girls weren’t. In a way Irish lasses weren’t. Her complexion was dark and her eyes were dark and her voice had been deliberately modeled on Janis Joplin’s. There had always been something exotic about her (and the whole clan come to that). The exoticism of fallen aristocrats, or exiled royals adrift in a far-off land. Fiona had gone to America for five years, worked as a nurse, had a kid, left her husband, and come back to Derry just as Dermot was going inside, her father was dying of congestive heart failure, and her other brothers and sisters were leaving for anywhere else. Not exactly the brilliant move of the decade that one.

“It’s the polis, they’ve come to talk about Dermot,” Mrs. McCann said.

Fiona looked up from the ironing board. Her red hair was streaked with white and there were deep crevasses in her cheeks. She looked fifty or even sixty and I wondered whether she was using the big H. There was a fag-end hanging out of her mouth and she was already lighting another in anticipation of the first one dying.

“They haven’t lifted him, have they? Is he all right?” she asked.

“We haven’t lifted him. He’s still on the run,” I said.

Fiona’s eyes narrowed.

“Is that you? Sean Duffy?”

“It’s me. And this is Detective Constable Randall.”

“Fucksake. Sean fucking Duffy! Coming round here asking about Dermot,” Fiona said, practically spitting the words from her mouth.

“Is that wee Sean Duffy?” Mrs. McCann asked in a more welcoming tone, before adding, “Would you like a dish of tea?”

“I wouldn’t say no, if it’s no trouble, Mrs. McCann,” I told her.

“Ach, it’s nay bother. Have a seat. Have a seat. What about you, love, tea?”

Kate shook her head. “No thank you,” she replied.

We moved aside a stack of slim poetry books and took a seat on a cushion-less sofa.

Fiona turned off the iron, stubbed the first cigarette out in a full Rothmans ashtray, walked across the room with the fresh one, and sat opposite us on an upturned plastic delivery box that served as a living-room table.

“I heard you joined the police. Couldn’t believe it. How do you sleep at night?” she asked.

I’d been asked this question so many times I had a prepared set of responses with ascending levels of sarcasm (depending on my contempt for the interrogator), but this was not the time or place for those. I ignored the query and asked: “How come you’re living here? What happened to your house on Creggy Terrace? That was a lovely place.”

It was too. Light filled, airy, five bedrooms . . .

“Ach! They burned us out!” Fiona explained.

“Who?”

“Who knows? UVF, INLA, UDA . . . what does it matter? The house is long gone.”

“Was this after Dermot went inside?”

“Of course it was! Do youse think they’d have had the nerve to touch us with Dermot still out!” Mrs. McCann said, coming back with the tea and coconut buns she had clearly made herself. They looked on the ancient side but it would be impolite not to take one.

“How did you end up in the peelers?“ Fiona asked.

“I suppose there just wasn’t enough excitement in my life.”

“I’m surprised you’re still alive. They’ve got a bounty on Catholic peelers, don’t they?”

“They do indeed.”

I took a bite of the coconut nasty. All I could taste was baking soda and treacle. I swallowed some tea to get it down. That too was vile. Maybe the pair of them were trying to earn that bounty right now.

“So does Orla live here too?” I enquired.

“Is that what it said in your wee intelligence reports?” Fiona asked with a cackle.

I nodded. “That’s exactly what it said. It said that the three of you were sharing this place.”

“She’s moved out,” Mrs. McCann said, sighing.

“Don’t tell him where, Ma, it would be collaboration!” Fiona hissed.

“I’ll tell him! I’ll tell anybody that wants to know. Orla’s mitched off with Poppy Devlin, so she has. One of his wee Shanty hoors now! High as a kite, so she is. We are scundered! Can’t put our heads out the door for the shame of it!”

I was shocked, and there was a leaden silence while I digested this information. Dermot McCann’s sister was whoring for some drug-dealing pimp called Poppy Devlin? Did Dermot have no currency left at all in this town?

Christ Almighty.

Maybe Dermot didn’t care what his family was up to, or maybe the old IRA operators were all being driven out by a new generation of drug dealers flush with cash who weren’t interested in politics or “the struggle.”

“Who is this Poppy Devlin?” I asked.

“What are you doing here anyway?” Fiona asked.

I showed her my warrant card. “I’m RUC Special Branch. I’m looking for Dermot. I’d like him to turn himself in.”

Fiona laughed without any sign of mirth. “You’re a good one, you are, Sean Duffy.”

“I’d like him to turn himself in before the Brits find him and top him.”

“The Brits will never find him, so they won’t!” Mrs. McCann said.

“We’ll not tell you where he is, even if we did know, which we don’t. Do you think he’d call us? Do you think he’s that much of an eejit? Have you forgotten who you’re dealing with?”

I shook my head. “I haven’t forgotten, Fiona. But if he does get in touch will you do me a favor and mention what I said? It would be better if he turned himself in. If the SAS find him they’ll kill him. He’s got the Brits terrified.”

Fiona walked across the room and jabbed a finger in my chest. “We’ll be telling him nothing! And we’ll be telling you nothing! He never liked you. He never trusted you. I thought you were all right. But I see that I was mistaken. Now get out of here before I show you the back of my hand!”

I got to my feet.

Kate rose a moment later.

“Thanks for the tea and cake. Delicious as usual, Mrs. McCann,” I said.

The old lady smiled. “You were always a good boy, Sean. Ach, it’s just a shame things went the way they did, isn’t it?” she said dreamily.

“Aye, it is.”

I turned to look Fiona in the face. Her cheeks were red and again there was that weird light in their eyes, indicative of some rogue royal bloodline that had ended up in this ghastly sink estate in the arse-end of nowhere. “I’m fond of Dermot. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to him. That’s not a threat. I just don’t want him to give the Brits an excuse to kill him in cold blood. They’re pulling out all the stops looking for him—hence my involvement—and it would be better if he turned himself in. Please pass on the message if he gets in touch.”

This made her furious. “Will you fuck off, copper, or do I have to throw you out meself!” she hissed.

I opened the door, and when Kate came through Fiona spat on the ground at our feet and slammed it shut.

We walked back down the stairs in silence.

“Was that normal? Are you happy with the way that went?” Kate asked as we reached the bottom.

“It went exactly the way I expected it to go. It’s the way it’s going to go with all of Dermot’s family. No one is going to tell us anything.”

“So how are you going to get a lead on him?”

I lit myself a cigarette and offered her one.

She shook her head.

“To be honest, love, I haven’t the foggiest,” I said.

Kate bit her lower lip. “So what is next?”

I drew in the tobacco smoke and let its warmth coat my lungs and clear my head. I rubbed my chin. “Well, there’s his uncle who’s still in the Derry area. We’ll try him next. And then Annie, his ex-wife down in Antrim, living with her ma and da. We’ll try her.”

“And then?”

I shook my head. “The rest of his family is across the water. Didn’t you say they’re all in America and Australia and places like that?”

“Yes.”

“That’s a bit beyond our jurisdiction, isn’t it? And his old comrades are either in prison or on the run from prison . . .”

“So, again, my question, what will you do?”

“If no one will talk?”

“If no one will talk.”

“Hope that somebody changes their mind or that Dermot slips up.”

Although she attempted to hide it I could see that she was disappointed in me. She’d put her neck out for me and promised her bosses miracles but I was no miracle worker. I was an average, maybe a below-average, detective in a rather mediocre police force. Nothing more, nothing less. She’d given me another chance, and I appreciated it, but one man could do very little.

We walked out of the building and found the hoodlum king guarding my car against all comers. I gave him the tenner.

“Where would I find a fella called Poppy Devlin?” I asked.

“The offy on Carlisle Gardens. Don’t go to him. He’s pricey. I can sort you out if you’re after some brown, or,” he looked uneasily at Kate, “a wee milly or something?”

“Nah, you’re all right, son.”

We got in the Beemer. It was raining so I put on the wipers. This part of Derry was better behind rain and wipers.

“Where to now?” Kate asked.

“We’ll go see the uncle.”

I made sure that first I drove past the offy on Carlisle Gardens. It was the usual concrete bunker covered in metal grilles and graffiti. Under the overhang there were a couple of goons in Peter Storm coats chatting and chain smoking.

I clocked them and the location and the vibe.

I’d be back.

“Where’s the uncle live?” Kate asked. “You said he lived around here?”

“He’s in Muff. Just over the border in Donegal.”

“Oh God, I suppose we’ll have to go through the Foreign Office to get permission to interview him.”

“Nah. We won’t even have to go through a police checkpoint.”

“What? How’s that possible?”

I drove along the Lenamore Road and took a left down a semi-concealed slip road that I knew. It was a seldom used country lane that went through a now derelict farm. The lane was rutted and flooded but the Beemer handled it with only minimum complaint.