Sacrifice of Fools (21 page)

‘Who let this clown in here?’ Peterson says. Senses stretched by dexedrine, Roisin Dunbar imagines she can hear an edge of tension in his flat voice.

‘Maybe the greenfly are the heirs of the earth. Maybe God intended it for them, not for us. They’re certainly better at subduing and possessing it. Maybe they should have it. What do you think, Gavin?’

‘You what?’

‘I’m interested in what you think about greenfly. Should we let them rule the world or not?’

‘Do I have to answer this fool?’

‘You do,’ Willich says.

‘OK. Greenfly. You get a big bug spray. You take the top off. You point it. You press the button. Greenfly problem sorted. They aren’t ruling the world any more.’

Littlejohn pauses, fiddles with his beard. He is playing, Dunbar thinks. He has power here. He controls language, and who controls language controls thought. He loves this power. His children are gone, his wife is gone, his job is going nowhere; the only thing he can control are the words. Psychologist, shrink thyself.

‘You’re not married, are you, Gavin?’

‘I’m not.’

‘You never were, were you?’

‘If you know this why are you asking me?’

‘No girlfriends, no live-ins.’

‘No.’

‘It wasn’t a question this time. Did you ever have any girlfriends, Gavin?’

‘Yes. Plenty. I’m not a homosexual pervert.’

‘I never said you were, Gavin. OK, plenty of girlfriends, but nothing longer than’— he shrugs, opens his hands — ‘six months? Three months?’

‘A couple of months, if you really want to know.’

‘Your mates, Gavin. I suppose they’re lost causes. Wives. Houses. Cars. DIY. Home furnishing. Trips to B & Q on a Sunday. Satellite TV. Big stereos. Holidays in Disneyworld. Big repayments. Big mortgages. Children. Children all over the place; you’re tripping over their bikes and slipping on their roller skates and kicking their toys, and when you go to see your mates all they talk about is babies and schools and who’s got what sickness and will have to go to the doctor and they’ve got their sprogs’ scrawls stuck up on the fridge with magnets and you can’t even take them out for a wee jar or two because the wee wifey’s at her step aerobics on Tuesdays and they can’t get a minder. Great lads, gone to pot. And you’re the only real, free man among them.

‘Are you, Gavin?’

‘They’ve got their lives, I’ve got mine. I’ve got the church, that’s my family.’

‘But no kids, Gavin. When you die, you don’t leave anything behind. You don’t continue. You stop. Your geneline withers and dries up. All your mates are reproducing like greenfly, offspring everywhere, new generations, they’re going to live for ever! And you’re sterile, Gavin. You’re going to die out from the earth.’

‘I don’t want kids. I don’t like kids.’

Littlejohn says nothing, but he has that Littledick, too-smart, over-educated look in his eyes. Roisin Dunbar feels sorry for Gavin Peterson. Almost.

‘Did you ever take a look at the last census, Gavin? The one back in 2000? Of course that was before the Outsiders arrived and bollixed the figures up. You should have a read of it some time. You’d find it fascinating. It makes some interesting predictions about the demographic make-up. It seems that one dividend of the Slow Peace no one foresaw was a baby boom. All of a sudden there’s a future to bring children into. The good people of Ulster have been rutting like rabbits ever since. What’s really interesting is how this baby boom is structured. It looks like the old clichés were true after all: the Catholics finally outbred the Protestants. All those priests, forbidding them sinful, evil contraceptives, urging them to have more and more children, winning this country for the true faith. They’ve got a paper majority already. By 2013 it’ll be a political majority. They reckon by 2020 the position of a hundred years ago will be reversed. It’ll be seventy-thirty Catholic to Protestant. A century to bust Protestant Ulster.

‘And then there’re the Outsiders. They’re real greenfly. We took a full shipload, one hundred thousand. Do you know what the Shian do when they settle a new planet? They breed. Like greenfly. The universe is a big place and even with those light-speed ships of theirs they can’t rely on back-up arriving. They’re on their own, so they make babies. The pioneers are biologically engineered to have multiple births. In a year that hundred thousand is two hundred thousand, next year four hundred thousand, year after that a million. They come out of the womb walking and talking, by the time they’re eight they’re pregnant and the great thing about only having sex twice a year is if you want to get pregnant you are guaranteed to get pregnant. You think Catholics are outbreeding you? The Outsiders are going to bury all of us in bodies. The country’s more than half gone now, between the Catholics and the Outsiders. Everything you’ve done for it, all the love and devotion you’ve spent on it, and you still couldn’t keep it safe. How have they done it? With their bodies, and the bodies of their children, and their children’s children. You’re in a state of siege, like Derry’s Walls again, but they keep piling up the bodies against the fortifications and they climb up them, and they keep piling them up and climbing up them, and one day they’re going to pour over the wall like a tidal wave. Their descendants have won it for them. Their children, their immortality. You see, Gavin, in the end their children are going to give them everything they want, and you will have it all taken away because you have nothing to come after you. Abstract principles, political ideals, stirring words and deeds and military glory; they sound mighty fine, but they don’t count. Bodies count. Bodies win. The greenfly take over the world.

‘So tell me Gavin, how does that make you feel? Envious? Angry? Impotent? Don’t you wish you had a big can of that bug spray you were talking about, and you could blow them all away, just wipe them out and have it clean and good and safe again?’

‘Do I have to listen to this clown? What is he talking about? What is he going on about?’

You’ve got him, Littledick. Now all you have to do is reel the poor bastard in.

‘Actually, Gavin, I’ve been bullshitting you. I’m a xenologist. I study Outsiders; what they are, what makes them tick. I’m interested in your church’s attitude to them. Really, I am. They’re just animals, isn’t that what you believe?’

The silence is an indication to Peterson that this question is not rhetorical.

‘You have to understand that there’s a spiritual battle going on,’ Peterson says. ‘These are the end times, when the creatures of Satan will be loosed upon the earth and Satan will dazzle men’s hearts and reign until Christ comes again to overthrow him and establish his kingdom. The devil is the counterfeiter of all God’s work; for God there is the Anti-God, Satan; for Christ there is the Anti-Christ in Rome; for Adam, there is the anti-Adam, the mockery of man.’

Eschatology always gave Roisin Dunbar the creeps. In school the wee over-holy girls had timetabled the end of the world and looked for signs of its close approach and gone around warning everyone that they had better mend their ways should Jesus find them like foolish virgins. A unimpeachable excuse for a shag; the end of the world is nigh, unvirgin me, now.

‘The Shian.’

‘They say they come from another world, but the truth, the scriptural truth, is that there is only this world, created by God, and that man is his highest creation, and that these are made things, creatures sent to pervert our God-given manhood and womanhood.’ Peterson’s getting hot about this. His mouth has a head of steam behind it.

‘So, if they are made by the devil, then they have no souls.’

‘Only God can give spiritual life.’

‘So they’re no different from animals. It wouldn’t be any more of a sin to kill one than it would be to kill a cat. In fact, you’d be doing the world a favour, getting rid of a minor demon.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I’m not getting at anything, Gavin. Just trying to put things together. So, they’re a threat to your identity, you envy them their extraordinary fecundity, and your church basically gives you open season on them.’

‘What are you saying? Are you saying that I killed those ones on University Street? Do you think I did? Gillespie accused me of that; he was like you, he thinks that anyone who hates them wants to kill them. I didn’t do it. I wouldn’t do it.’

‘You did it to three North Belfast Catholics, and they’re the same species as you. They have souls. These are only animals.’

‘That was before. I’ve been washed in the blood. I’m a Godfearing, God-loving man.’

‘But not as much as you fear the Shian, isn’t that right? You fear them, and you love them. You just told me you’re the kind of man who loves what he fears, fears what he loves. They scare the shit out of you, but they attract you at the same time. They’ve got the things you want. Community, children, identity — every Shian knows what it is, where it comes from, it’s got ten thousand years of recorded history behind it. What’ve you got? Four hundred years since the plantation — these people had planted five entire planets by then. And now they’ve got the thing you dedicated your life to: they’ve got your country. That’s why you go to that club, to look at the thing you fear. You wouldn’t touch them, you wouldn’t do the things the others there do, that’s bestiality. You go to look. Look good and long and hard. Love. Fear. Like that old film with Robert Mitchum where he had love and hate tattooed on his knuckles. He was a God-fearing, God-loving man too. He killed people.’

‘I didn’t kill anyone.’

‘Then why were you in that club?’

‘I was on business.’

‘Exterminating Outsiders is business?’

‘I didn’t exterminate anyone or anything.’

‘I don’t believe you. I’ll tell you why. We have a psychological profile of who we’re looking for. It fits you like a glove. Everything you say, everything you do, everywhere you go, everything you’ve done, the profile was there first. How do you think I was able to tell you all those things about yourself? The profile. The profile tells me that you killed those Outsiders, Gavin.’

‘You are talking bullshit now. This is bullshit. Complete bullshit.’

‘The profile even predicted you’d react that way when directly accused. You did it, Gavin. Why not tell me? This is true, no word of bullshit: I’ve seen cases like this before. They protest and they protest that they didn’t do it, but the funny thing is, deep down inside, they really want to tell me. They want someone to know. Some because they’re proud of what they’ve done, others because it sickens them, they can’t live with it inside, eating them away. Are you proud, or is it eating you away? And I’ll tell you something else. The ones it’s eating up, when they do tell someone, it stops. The looks of peace on their faces; it’s amazing, Gavin. You can tell me, Gavin. Why not? We’ve already got you. This way you get to tell it how you like. You killed them, didn’t you?’

‘For fuck’s sake, I keep telling you I didn’t kill anyone.’

‘Then why were you in the club? What was your business?’

‘The tape. All right? The fucking tape. That was why I was in the club. You think I’d go to something like that? I was there to get the tape.’

The silence seems much longer than measured by the wall clock.

‘The tape?’

Peterson sighs. The wind and the spirit go out of him, he crumples, withering. Littledick has him, but it’s not the fish he was angling for. The Shian-killer is still out there, swimming in dark water.

‘There’s a DUP councillor. Sammy Dow. He’s on the Planning Committee. Wife, kids, goes to the old Paisley church on the Ravenhill Road, and every Tuesday evening when his wife thinks he’s at a committee meeting he’s at that place. The Chink has other rooms, out the back, where you can go with them. We have a camera in one.’

‘We?’ Willich asks.

‘The UDF.’

‘You’re blackmailing a Belfast City Councillor,’ Dunbar says.

‘It’s bigger than that. It’s who leads the Protestants in Belfast. The Democratic Unionists went downhill after they stuck Paisley in Purdysburn. They’re finished. The UDF is the voice of the Protestant community. There’re elections coming up in May. By then we should have enough on enough DUP men to swing the North and East Belfast wards.’

‘You’re going to smear them?’

‘And show the pan-Nationalist front we’re as dirty as them? No; so as not to split the Unionist vote, we’ll arrange a series of electoral pacts where the DUP will stand aside in favour of a UDF candidate.’

‘Jesus, it is Kincora all over again,’ Willich says. Then: ‘How high does this go?’

He’s trapped. Learn this from the Taigs: confession is good for the soul.

‘To the top.’

Roisin Dunbar closes her fist under the interview table. Yes! Got you, Pastor McIvor Kyle, you smug bastard. I’m coming to winkle you out of your big brick bunker and God is going to turn his face away. She looks at the clock on the wall. Eighteen thirty-five. An hour and ten minutes to crack.

The cars are going out. The barrier is up, and they are going out in convoy. Ten cars, four police in each, five teams of two. They have search warrants, and an attitude. Ten minutes before, Roisin Dunbar had come through the CID office and her search team had fallen in behind her while the others cheered and applauded and shouted encouragements like ‘Go, Rosh!’ and ‘Fuck the bastard’, and she had felt like gangbusters. Underneath that beige trench coat there’re Batgirl’s boots and black lycra.

The cars turn out on to Donegal Pass. A uniform stops the traffic for them. Down on to the Ormeau Road. Along Cromac Street into Victoria Street and on towards the M2, a big line of dark-coloured Fords. They lose the first two cars at the lights on York Street by the Art College. Two for the Crumlin Road Dissenting Presbyterian Church. Four more at the turn off on to the M2, accelerating smoothly up to high speed cruise, for the Glengormley Faith Tabernacle. Another two straight on into the York Road, for the Dee Pee Fortwilliam Mission. Detective Sergeant Roisin Dunbar leads the last two, left up the Limestone Road, right at the lights up by the Waterworks on to the Antrim Road. Two cars for Pastor McIvor Kyle’s Victorian residence at Ben Madigan.