Sacrifice of Fools (26 page)

Shit shit shit shit shit.

Willich switches the sirens on again, but the traffic down the Ormeau Road still won’t take him seriously.

The mobile rings again.

‘Yah.’ The sirens go off, again. ‘Ah-hah.’ Littlejohn is leaning forward, trying to overhear the twitter in Dunbar’s ear. ‘Uh-huh.’ Long silence. Big twitter. ‘OK. Thanks.’ She sighs and seems to crumple in the front seat. She very slowly puts the mobile back in its place on the dash.

‘They got him too,’ she says. ‘The Coleraine force went to his room. It was locked, they broke it down. Exactly the same.’

‘Hell,’ Willich says. ‘And let me guess, a student hall of residence, and no one saw anything or heard anything.’

‘The others on the corridor reckoned he was late back from the weekend or something. Scene of crime reckon he’d been there two days.’

‘Two days?’ Littlejohn says. ‘When two days ago, morning, evening, night?’

‘They won’t know until they’ve done a pm,’ Roisin Dunbar says. I know what you’re driving at Littledick, because I’m there with you. While party unknown was blowing McIvor Jnr’s skull up like a dropped melon, prime suspect Andy Gillespie’s every movement was being observed and recorded and they did not include day excursions to Coleraine.

‘Littlejohn,’ Willich says, ‘I need a suspect.’

‘Eamon Donnan.’

‘The one’s gone Sheenie, over in Queen’s Island?’ They stop at the lights on the Ormeau Bridge. The pedestrian light is green, foot traffic is crossing. An Outsider passes in front of the car from the park gate side, with a back pack inside which things seem to be moving like fighting rats.

‘He was in the Maze with Gillespie, and Gavin Peterson. I’ve been doing some research into what went on in there. You might remember — it made the news — that a Shian lawyer — a
genro
— fell foul of the majesty of law pursuing personal justice for his client a tad over-zealously and got sent down for six months. He was a Harridi, same sept as the University Street ones. Gillespie and Donnan befriended him, they got close. In Donnan’s case, maybe too close. Maybe a little over-enamoured with the condition of being alien. Anyway, there was an incident —
kesh
chemicals in a confined environment, the place was like a pressure cooker full of testosterone — and the Shian died. There was an inquiry. It’s different nowadays, but they’d only been here a couple of years and none of us really knew anything.’

The lights have changed and the car is on the bridge now. Dunbar glances out of her window at the flags and emblems flying from Annadale Hold. Whole family murder; the horrifying, implacable premeditation of the hunter. The thing that will not stop until it has completed its task.

‘You think this Eamon Donnan is getting his own back?’ Willich asks.

‘Nothing so simple. Human male sexuality is a fragile and frightening thing. Bend it out of shape, everything else bends with it.’

Willich drives up the tail of a pony and trap laden with old forklift pallets and flashes his lights to intimidate the tinker holding the reins.

‘All right. Eamon Donnan is now our prime suspect.’

They can see the crowd from the bottom of the Pass. Up at the station both sides of the street are lined with bodies. Light glints from lenses: journalists. Uniforms clear the hacks from the car park gates. Hands wave tape recorders at the windows. Voices are shouting about confirmation of rumours and Antrim Road.

‘Well, someone’s found something out from somewhere,’ Willich says as the uniform swings the barrier down behind the car. The press mobs them across the road from the car park. First time Roisin Dunbar’s had fifty men barking after her. And women too. They’re waving machinery in her face and shouting the same question in different phrasings: can she confirm that police raids on premises and property of the Dissenting Presbyterian Church are connected with the University Street killings?

‘Sergeant Dunbar, can you confirm that you’re investigating Pastor McIvor Kyle in connection with the Outsider Welcome Centre murders? Is he in custody?’

No, he’s lying in the mortuary up at Foster Green Hospital. His wife’s on one side of him, his daughter’s on the other. Just like all those photographs you took of him on the steps of Faith Cathedral. Family values unto the last. She puts her head down, Diana style, walks on. Willich stops at the security gate and turns to talk to the news.

‘I can confirm that we are holding Gavin Peterson, Rev Kyle’s Security agent, pending further inquiries,’ he says. ‘We will be making a full press statement later today clarifying the situation.’ As he follows Dunbar and Littlejohn into the station he adds sotto voce, ‘When we’ve got Eamon Donnan’s backside in the next cell down.’

The cars are going out again from Donegal Pass. The usual agents of the law are in them — even Darren Healey. EU paternity leave bows to police expedience. There are vans this time, with uniforms in them. Queen’s Island Hold is a big, alien country, with many places to hide between the detritus of failed heavy industry and the new habitations and agri-industrial plants. They go by a back gate; they are halfway down to the Ormeau Road by the time the journalists realize something is happening without them. The press breaks camp and gives chase in a flotilla of hatchbacks. Potential scandals involving ministers of God, born-again terrorists and aliens are unmissable copy.

The line of cars goes along Cromac Street into Victoria Street. But this time it does not shed cars at each junction. This time all the vehicles go over the bridge to the quay. They’re driving fast. They like the speed that pushes everything from in front of them, that asserts the implacability of law. Human, Shian, just move it. They slam to a stop all around the sacred space. The Volkswagen kids throw up their hands in surrender, but the police storm past them and their camp-fire and their wet wool and their hash and their busting bass. It’s Go Go Go time.

It’s not like your ordinary church, Littlejohn told them at the briefing. Unlike any other kind of religious architecture you’ve ever seen, this works. It’s like an acid trip. Be warned. They listened carefully, they made notes, and now they’re ignoring him. There’s a fucker to grab. One team for each entrance. If he’s in there, they’ll get him out. No bother. Some Sheenie in a frock comes out flapping its hands and jabbering. Someone grab hold of the bastard, keep it out of our way, right? If it make a fuss, charge it with obstruction. There’s work to be done. Right. In.

‘What the hell do they think they’re playing at?’ Littlejohn says, in the passenger seat of Roisin Dunbar’s car. ‘I told them go by the north entrance. Can you people not follow simple instructions?’

Littlejohn and Dunbar and the rest of the police watch and wait. They watch and wait much longer than they expect.

‘Right,’ Littlejohn says. Roisin Dunbar thinks of Basil Fawlty. He takes a small jar of Vick vapour rub out of his pocket, rubs a dab under each nostril, offers the jar to Dunbar. ‘It’s difficult enough keeping a clear head without
kesh
chemicals turning you into a slobbering pussy-fiend.’ She puts a smear on her upper lip. Woof. Goodbye sinusitis. They get out of the car. ‘I’ll handle this,’ Littlejohn shouts to Willich. The uniforms and detectives stand down.

Littlejohn goes to speak with the Shian — the keeper of the sacred space, he tells her; more a curator than a priest. Janitor of the mysteries. Dunbar realizes that this is the first time she has seen the consultant xenologist with an Outsider. A live one. A complete one. That’s the thing about academics. Everything’s abstracted, removed from source. The second-hand is better than direct experience. Like Michael and his virtual newsgroups and virtual communities and virtual friends. The empire of the fake. Like the dance club: appearance, seeming. God, is this all we have, a choice of surfacings?

‘Dr Littlejohn, I protest at this unwarranted and unmannerly invasion of my wardenship. You would not do this if it were your own St Anne’s Cathedral.’

‘I can only apologize for their disrespect.’

‘I have told the officers that Eamon Donnan is not in the sacred space. He has not been here for two days.’

‘I’m afraid they don’t believe you. They want to see for themselves.’

‘I think that they are seeing more than they had bargained for, Dr Littlejohn.’

Littlejohn and Dunbar go round to the north entrance. At the door Littlejohn produces an unlabelled quarter bottle of transparent liquid. He uncaps it, swigs down half the bottle, grimaces.

‘God, that’s rough. I thought this might happen, so I nipped back home and brought a chemical ally.’ He offers it to Vick-besmeared Roisin Dunbar. She sniffs it. Poteen.

‘This is hardly the time.’

‘This is the time, believe me. You want something that’s going to hit your nervous system hard and fast. Like I told you, I’m a gin man myself, but this is the quickest.’

She forces it down. A few seconds, and then it hits the inside of her skull like a punishment beating.

‘I’ll bother you about where you got it from later,’ she says, and they go in.

Woo, goes Roisin Dunbar, immersed in glory. She almost falls to her knees and it’s proof that the poteen is working that she realizes that if she did she wouldn’t get up again. Like those other dark huddles on the floor. What’s the line from the old hymn? Lost in wonder, awe and praise, something like that. Exactly like that. Is that Darren Healey?

‘Healey?’ she asks and stops to listen as harmonies and cadences swoop around the curves of draped fabric like swallows. So many voices in my voice. She walks to him. He seems miles away. ‘Come on.’ He looks up into her face with awe. What does he see? Angel face? Long time since a man looked at her like that.

Something in the electromagnetic signature of the sacred space has blanked her watch, so Roisin Dunbar has no idea how long it takes to help the God-shocked police out into the mundane light. The light seems quite different every time she comes out towing her crocodile of officers. They sit around on the damp concrete outside the loading dock, arms on knees, blinking. The Volksfolk offer them coffee. Meanwhile Littlejohn has proved that the Shian Thetherrin was truthful and there is no Eamon Donnan hiding in the folds of God’s mantle. Willich marshals his remaining officers. Three cars go to shut down the access routes into Queen’s Island. The rest go out into the Shian town.

The day is rare and bright, high clear March. A scattered flock of small cumulus is driven on an east wind, shadows swoop over the rooftops, dip into the streets. The season has come and the shipyard unfolds like a blossom. Place and people shed colour: banners of Nations and Holds older than human history crack in the stiff wind; on ladders and scaffolding settlers touch up paintwork buffeted by the winter gales. Blues and greens are the favoured hues. The live polymer skins of the new architecture have grown patterns: complex scrolls and leaf forms, variants on the universal Shian symbol of the fourfold yin-yang. Tattooed buildings. Squeezed into the Queen’s dry dock like a queen termite, the beached orbiter puts out spring colours; a reticulation of orange over dark red. In the adjacent Musgrave dock the miniature forest the Shian have engineered out of the rust-stained concrete is coming into bloom. Pursed crimson leaf buds open; the branches drop clusters of tiny white blossoms. Unseen things call and dart through the canopy. The wild wood grows in the heart of every Shian.

Kesh
perfumes sweep through the wide, puddled streets. Unseen clouds of
hahndahvi
congregate about the crane gantries like the flocks of starlings, thousands strong, that dash and plunge around the city’s bridges. The wind carries snatches of music; down on the dance floors it will not stop until the season ends. The
koonteesh
can drum for days on end, without eating, without sleeping. Theirs is a special grace, to sublimate the sexual energy of
kesh
into music. In the streets the males clutch at their fanciful headdresses, gather in folds and flounces of costumes that have been added to and decorated and modified for centuries, and now have been carried across interstellar space and sixty years of time. For many of the males, their costumes were the only possessions they brought. In the old cutting and plating sheds teams of males work on new costumes, designing, cutting, sewing, constructing head pieces. Everything may be appropriated for a dress: fabric, fashion, history, architecture, irony, industrial waste. Twice a year the city’s haberdashers are besieged by high-spending costumiers. The council dumps run a profitable black market in recyclables.
Kesh
customs differ between Nations; among the Harridis the way is for teams to select and prepare a champion, like an entourage readying a knight for chivalrous combat. Bodies are decorated, hair is dyed and woven with ornaments. The retainers share the glory of their star, should his display and dance attract attention. They will get their fuck. Beneath tents of live skin rigged from crane gantries, old males dried to leather by pheromones and dance feed the forms and patterns in a drop of musk to just-pubescent eight-year-olds, shaking with the surge of unfamiliar chemicals and emotions through their bloodstreams.

Groups of females in traditional hunting costume call to the males. Ribaldry is exchanged, looks, scents are remembered for the night’s contests. Many of the females’ staffs bear strings of prey; rats, cats, gulls. No shortage of any of those in the shipyards, though carloads have been chased off the big landfill on the other side of the lough, and the RSPB has mounted a guard on the swans in Victoria Park.
Joy
is everywhere, in the looks, in the clothes, in the music, in the air. Children run through the joy; to them it is as palpable as weather. Some chase balls, some rush around on low-rider tricycles, all are completely ignored by the simmering adults. Everything is put away when the heat season comes. No work is done, no projects are begun, no business is conducted, no vendettas are executed, no law is practised. There is only heat, and lust, and
joy.

The police scurry like cockroaches through the world party. They go along the wide human streets, and through the narrow Outsider alleys, and across the walkways and bridges that tie the disparate elements of Queen’s Island into one sprawling unit, a great Hold house, almost as large as the enormous Holds of the Shian Hearth, thousands of years old, sprawling for miles across their demesnes. They go into its living areas and its sleeping areas and its manufacturing areas, they go into its dance floors and its workshops and they go through the coiled chambers of the big lander in the dock, spooked a little by the stacked stasis coffins in which the settlers slept through the forties and fifties and sixties and seventies and eighties and nineties on their journey to World Ten. They go down into the plantation in the Musgrave Dock, between the red trees, and they wonder what the hell is making that noise? But when they look they can never see. They knock on doors. They stop people. They ask questions. They show photographs. They try to be polite, but they get smiled at because it’s the season, and blood is hot and emotions are smoking. They grow angry, but not because of the smiling. The pheromones have got inside them. Their blood is hot, their emotions are smoking. And they are the Northern Ireland Police Service. They get impatient. They get arrogant. There are disputes. There are arguments. There are threats of arrest. Females in hunting garb stare out officers in dark green uniforms. Names start to be used. Politically incorrect language. Then a police Ford driven too fast, too aggressively, with too much testosterone, clips a child’s tricycle. The driver hits the brakes but the trike flips twenty feet across the road. The police are out and over in an instant — the kid’s all right, it’s landed on its feet — but in that same instant fifty shipyarders bubble out of the brickwork. Fifty more appear the next instant, and they are all smiling. The police call for back-up, and within two minutes there are twenty officers facing two hundred Shian. Concentrated chemicals. Shian crests rise. Human pituitary glands thump. Hands on guns, boys. Potential riot situation. Break out the baton rounds. Shian children go skittering around their ankles, oblivious. Littlejohn and Dunbar go in as Willich opens a channel to Mountpottinger and asks them to stand by a tactical support group.