Nothing but Memories (DCI Wilson Book 1) (16 page)

             
"That's if anyone will talk to me," Whitehouse said.

             
"Don't underestimate your powers of persuasion," Wilson said smiling. "It never ceases to amaze me that we're so much better informed on the activities and personnel of the Republican side than we are on the Loyalist side."

             
Whitehouse said nothing and continued to lean against the door-jam. He stared at the bulky figure sitting behind the desk. Why was it that he had to work with the only officer on the Force who didn’t regard the Fenians as the enemy? If the rumours in the station were to be believed Wilson wouldn’t be sitting behind that desk for long. The boys at the top wanted people they could trust implicitly. There was no doubt that Wilson was probably the best detective on the Force but he was a loose canon himself. You never knew what he was going to do and that didn’t sit well with the top brass.

             
"Get on with it George," Wilson looked at the papers on his desk. "We won’t catch our man by spending our days holding the wall up. Let's find out whether your contacts can solve our little problem."

             
Whitehouse turned quickly from the door.

             
Wilson bundled up the scattered documents on his desk and formed a neat pile. Maybe, he thought, if he were to throw the handful of A4 pages into the air, the one with the piece of information which would lead to the professional with the nine millimetre would land on the top of the pile. That police work should be so easy. He looked through the glass partition into the squad room where four detectives from his staff of six were working. He continued to stare at the group until Harry Graham raised his head and met his superior's eyes. He beckoned Graham by crooking the index finger of his right hand. The detective stood up wearily from his desk an approached Wilson's tiny office.

             
"Let’s go through the statements you collected from Peacock’s neighbours, Harry," Wilson said when Graham presented himself in the doorway.

             
There had to be a clue somewhere. No matter how clever the murderer had been he had to make one small slip. But it would certainly be buried in a mountain of crap and would require hours of sifting and examining to turn it up. But that was what the British taxpayer paid him to do. He and his men would continue to wade through the crap until they located that nugget of information. No matter how long it took.

CHAPTER
19

Simpson looked around the faces of the four men who sat in the back room of the `Balmoral Bar'. He coughed and felt bile in his mouth as his nose and stomach reacted to the smells of stale beer from the bar and the ammonia from the open door of the toilet that competed with each other before combining to create a mixture with the potency of mustard gas. He decided to make the meeting as short as possible. The men sitting around the table in the back room of the bar had at one time constituted the entire Belfast High Command of the Ulster Volunteer Force, the most hard-line and vicious of the Protestant paramilitary groups. Each man sitting at the table had murdered in the name of Ulster. In Mafia parlance, each of the former UVF chiefs was a `made man'. Some many times over. All four had served terms of imprisonment in the infamous `Long Kesh' prison outside Belfast. But now all four were free men unstained by their 'criminal' pasts. He felt uncomfortable in the company of these dinosaurs. But even dinosaurs were useful to the political movement. The connection between the Protestant political parties and the paramilitaries went back to the establishment by Edward Carson of the original Ulster Volunteer Force which was intended to safeguard Ulster from invasion from the Catholic South. The best known UVF was created with political connivance in the 1960's but the membership lacked the discipline of Carson's original force and the UVF had become synonymous with brutal sectarian murders. Many of the Protestant politicians regarded the UVF as an evil, but a necessary evil. The organisation was often the instrument which had been used to terrorise the Catholic population. However, like their IRA `brothers', the former UVF chiefs had slowly gravitated towards the status of `godfathers' and each man made his living exclusively from the proceeds of his criminal empire. As the organisation metamorphosed from a sectarian strike force to a criminal conspiracy, so the hold of the politicians over the organisation had diminished.

             
The two major chieftains sat on either side of Simpson. Sammy Rice, whose fiefdom covered East Belfast sat to his right while to his left sat Jimmy McGreery, the 'godfather' in Central Belfast. The other two participants, Norman White from North Belfast and Ross Younger from South Belfast sat facing the other three men.

             
"This better be good," McGreery adjusted his fat body on the small wooden chair and glared into Simpson's face. McGreery, overlord of Sandy Row, was in a hurry to get away from the meeting. He was as busy as any other executive in Northern Ireland and his business empire needed his constant attention.

             
"I'm just a messenger boy," Simpson started defensively. He glanced over his shoulder before remembering that his `minder' had been left outside along with the other bodyguards. He was in no doubt that if these men decided to kill him, he would end up very dead indeed.

             
"Some messenger boy," Rice was the veteran of the group and the unchallenged leader. As a young man, he had proved himself to be a vicious, resourceful killer and had climbed to the top of his organisation by demonstrating the inability of the previous leadership to control him. He led the largest and most violent gang which was centred on the Protestant heartland of the Shankill Road. The fact that the meeting was taking place on his turf was not insignificant. Of all the men in the room, Rice was the most dangerous. "Get on with it Richie, we've other fish to fry."

             
"Yeah, what's your fuckin' problem?" McGreery looked pointedly at his watch.

             
"You all know that there've been three Prods killed during the past few days," Simpson concentrated on a point on the table between his outspread hands.

             
The four faces surrounding him hardened.

             
"If you decide to stop tryin’ to be a second rate politician, you could try your hand at bein’ a comedian," Rice said. "Of course we know three Prods have been murdered. If three Taigs had been killed we'd be tryin' to find the bloke who did it to congratulate him. As it is we're tryin' to get our hands on the bastard who did them three boys in. If we do get him, we'll switch his light off."

             
Simpson looked directly into Rice's face. He'd known the former UVF chieftain since he was a pale-faced Belfast hood with a single gold chain around his neck. Rice had graduated to having an all year round tan, a pompadour hairstyle that would have been over the top even for Elvis and enough gold jewellery to set off an airport metal detector at twenty feet. He'd heard that Rice had recently become the owner of a half a million pound villa in the Canaries. Not bad for a boy from the back streets of Belfast.

             
"My boss is gettin' a little worried that you boys are goin' to overreact and start toppin' a load of Taigs," Simpson let his gaze pass along each man's face in turn. He didn't much like what he saw. These men were not the type who would  sit idly by.

             
"You can bet your fuckin' arse that we're goin' to over-react," Rice said. "The Taigs know the story. They kill some of ours and we fuckin-well kill more of them."

             
"That's the gist of it," McGreery said smiling.

             
"Bad move," Simpson said. "What happens if you go ape-shit? The peace goes up in smoke. The other side plant a bomb and kill a load of Prods. The Brits get even more pissed off with us than they are right now and shovel us down the tubes even quicker. The Assembly gets suspended again. You guys are livin' in cloud cuckoo land. The Brits want out and an all-out killin' war after a solution looks on the cards is goin' to send them running for the door. Think about it."

             
A sly smile spread across Rice's baby face. When he smiled, he was a most unlikely looking killer. "You people make me want to puke," he said. "You sit in your safe fuckin' house and draw your state salaries as so-called politicians. But who do the people on the street blame if the Taigs shoot them up." He swung his arm around the assembled chiefs. "Us. They won't hassle you in the streets. But they'll give the shit to me, and Jimmy, and Norm, and Ross. We don't draw the salaries but we get the fuckin' blame. It's fuckin' typical. You call the general strike. We enforce it. And what do we get out of it? Sweet fuck all, that's what. You and your fuckin' buddies think that you're goin' to carve up this province between you. But I've got news for you. We've still got the guns and the explosives and it just might be that we won't like your form of government any more than we liked Westminster's. So when the dust settles, we won't ask for something, we'll just take it."

             
"Okay, Sammy," McGreery said holding up two fat hands, "Richie gets the gist of it. Don't you, Richie?"

             
Simpson nodded in assent. Handing Ulster to these boys would be the equivalent of giving Italy to the Mafia.

             
"We know only too fucking well," McGreery continued glancing around the faces of the other chiefs. "About the three Protestants that have been topped in the past few days. And as sure as shit at this very minute on the Shankill, Prods are workin' themselves up to take a couple of Taigs out. From what we heard, the boys who were shot were civilians. That means we can hold off for a bit but not too long, mind."

             
The door opened and the barman entered carrying a tray of drinks. The five men seated at the table remained silent until the drinks had been served and the barman had left.

             
"I'm here to ask you to make sure that the killings don't escalate," Simpson picked up his glass of whiskey and sipped the contents.

             
The four men looked at each other.

             
"What's in it for us?" Rice asked.

             
"The same as what's in it for the rest of us," Simpson replied. "The Brits let us hold on here longer than if we force them to abandon us."

             
"I mean in the fuckin' short-term," a malevolent smile creased Rice's boyish features.

             
Oh Jesus, Simpson thought as he looked into Rice's face. This was a perfect example of the Ulster political process. Sitting in filthy backrooms of bars with four common criminals who would make even the Medelin cartel look saintly. The men surrounding him were totally without honour. They had all proved themselves to be sociopaths. They cared nothing for the people of their area only what they could get out of them. Just a short time ago they had feuded with each other over turf. Now each one wielded power within his own fiefdom carved out after the dead bodies had been dragged off to the morgue. The `foot-soldiers' did their chief's bidding because failing to do so laid them open to a code of punishment which could have been lifted directly from the Mafia code of
Omerta.
This was the legacy of the 'Troubles'. Men who had killed and killed badly without compunction. Men who were to all intents and purposes uncontrollable.

             
Simpson took a mouthful of his whiskey. He had only one card to play and now was the time to play it. "Maybe we can put some business your way," he began looking around the faces at the table, "I didn’t come here with anything concrete in mind. Maybe you can think about what you might be interested in."

             
"Maybe we can," Rice said without consulting the other men. "I wouldn’t advise you to renege on this one Richie."

             
"We know better than that," Simpson could feel the bile rising in his throat. He was well aware that if Rice wanted him dead then it would be done without the batting of an eyelid.

             
"Right," Rice said. "That it? We'll hold off and give the Peelers a shot at clearing this one up"

             
The four men around the table laughed in unison. "Fat fuckin' chance," McGreery said.  "Most of the Peelers in Tennent Street would need a map to find their own arseholes."

             
Simpson shook his head and rose from the table.

             
"Don't you forget our bargain, Richie boy," Rice laughed and nodded towards the door. "You've got forty-eight hours."

             
Simpson accepted his dismissal and left the room.

             
"Fuckin' crawlin' bastard," Rice said when the door had closed behind Simpson. "Get the word on the streets. No retaliation until we give the order. Anyone who breaks ranks will be lookin' for a new pair of knees. Any word on who topped the Prods?"

             
"It happened on my territory," Ivan McIlroy, Rice's lieutenant, stood behind his chief's chair. "I've been bangin' heads together but nobody is sayin' a word. The Other Side swear that they have nothin' to do with it."

             
"You can't trust those fuckin' bastards," White said angrily.

             
"One thing you should have learned in the `Kesh', Norman," Rice said harshly. "Is that we can trust them a damn sight more than we can trust fuckers like Simpson and the politicians he works for. The Provies and us are the same people. We're both in business now. At least in Ulster the poor will get to inherit something. They say they're not involved I believe the buggers." He turned to McIlroy. "Get the boys onto the streets. Somebody or other saw or heard something, then I want to know it." He ran his fingers over the stubble on his chin. "If the Fenians didn't kill the Prods and we didn't do it then who the fuck did? More to the point why were three nobodies topped? Find the answers, boys. Find the answers."

             
McGreery moved with a speed which belied his bulk and was through the door of the backroom almost before Rice had finished. White and Younger turned to bid Rice good-bye but he was already lost in thought.

             
Rice's intuition was telling him that somewhere in this mess there lay an advantage and he was straining all his senses trying to listen to his inner voice. He didn't see White and Younger leave the room nor did he hear the door close behind them. Even though he held the guns, the politicians held the power. Fuck power he wanted cash and lots of it. When you're forced you have to turn your hand to what you know. And he knew how to wreak pain on people to get what he wanted. This business might allow him to squeeze the balls of some of the bastards that looked down on him. That was the content of the message running around inside his head.