Sacrifice of Fools (7 page)

‘You use the word “fuck” very easily, very comfortably, Andy,’ Littlejohn says. ‘Fuck this, fuck that, fuck it up the ass. But there are other words you have difficulty saying. The word “mutilated”. The word “genitals”. The words “sex organs”, or “penis”, or “vagina”. Do you not feel as comfortable with those words as you do with fuck?’

‘Hey hey hey hey, what’s going on here?’

‘I’m curious about how you come to be working for the Welcome Centre. I think I can safely say that you must be the only member of your generation on the Woodstock Road that’s given up fixing cars for Shian-human mediation and translation services.’

‘Like they said about Elvis, good career move. Aren’t we supposed to be an opportunity culture, finding out wee gaps in the market, squeezing ourselves in, making money?’

‘Yes, but why this opportunity?’

-
I learned the language, I wanted to do something with it,
Gillespie says in Narha.

- In jail,
Littlejohn replied.

- In jail,
Gillespie answers.

‘Could we keep this to English, please?’ Roisin Dunbar says. The verbal warriors eyeball each other across the table.

-
If Dr Littlejohn’s Narha isn’t up to it,
Gillespie says in a very difficult sexual innuendo mode with phallic connotations. He repeats it for Dunbar’s benefit in cold English.

‘Your Narha is beyond reproach,’ Littlejohn says. ‘It’s your English lets you down with the odd significant slip. When you were talking about your children to Sergeant Dunbar, you said, “I always fancied a boy”. Do you?’

‘Jesus God, you think I’m one of these pervs gets off on Shian because they remind them of men, or women, or kids, or something?’

‘You’d be amazed, Mr Gillespie, the lengths paedophiles go to to get to work with children.’

‘You are trying to make me out to be something I’m not, some kind of perverted psycho killer. I work
—
I worked
—
with the Shian because I wanted to.’

‘Well, that’s not good enough. Why did you want to?’

‘It’s something I had to do. Something I had to put right. Something I owed them.’

‘What?’

Gillespie looks at the table top.

‘What?’

Gillespie looks at the turning spindles on the tape machine.

‘What did you owe them?’

Gillespie listens to the flat drip of water in the corridor. He won’t tell them. They can keep him here all night, as long as the law lets them hold him without charge, but he won’t tell them about the thing in the Maze. It’s his, all his. They don’t deserve to know it. This is one piece of his life he won’t let them unfold and pass around and snigger over. He sits. The tape winds. The sprinkler drips.

At last Littlejohn speaks.

‘One last thing, Andy.’

‘Don’t you ever fucking call me that. Ever.’

Littlejohn manages a sick smile. ‘If that’s what you want. Let’s go back to the trouble you had talking about the mutilation of the sex organs. Look, you’re squirming in your seat at the mention of it. Why do you find it difficult to talk about?’

‘It makes me sick, what that bastard did to them.’

‘I noticed an odd thing, did you notice it too? The children, they’d been left intact.’

‘Yes,’ Gillespie hisses. ‘I know.’

‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘Yes. It’s strange.’

‘Why is it strange?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Someone comes in, blows their heads up like grenades with five maser shots, then gets out a hunting knife, goes to the bodies of the adults, cuts out the men’s penises and testicles, cuts out the female’s vagina, womb and ovaries, puts them against the wall and incinerates them with the maser, but leaves the kids. Why leave the kids? Why not cut them up, make a perfect job?’

‘Will you shut the fuck up about—’

‘About what?’

‘About fucking mutilations.’

‘Why? Why, Andy? Tell me, what is it you find so hard about this?’

‘Because they were my fucking family!’ he shouts. And he’s calm. He’s cool. He’s all right. He’s all right. ‘And I told you never, ever to call me Andy. You know why the kids weren’t cut up as well as I do. Because they weren’t adult. They weren’t mature. Hell, they didn’t even have a sex; Shian kids don’t become male or female until puberty. They’re just kids. You know that, Littlejohn.’

‘And you know it. And so, it seems, does the killer.’

The soft hum of the tape machine changes pitch as leadertape runs over the heads and the cassette comes to an end. Drip, says the sprinkler. Dunbar turns the tape over, carefully noting times and durations. They check these things rigorously in this age of Joint Authority.

‘Your work with the Welcome Centre must have brought you into contact with all aspects of Shian society in Ireland,’ Roisin Dunbar ventures.

‘What are you trying now?’ Gillespie can hear the weariness in his voice and hates it.

‘I’m sure you’d have encountered all kinds of strange Shian technology.’

‘Oh, I get it. You really should leave this to Littlejohn; he throws you a curved ball. You, straight down the middle. I can see where you’re coming from. Shian technology, meaning weapons? Like masers? Look, I do translation work, I offer a mediation service, like if some employer wants to know why his Shian staff want five weeks’ holiday, or why all the men turn funny and aggressive twice a year when they come into contact with a Shian male employee, or if some poor bastard Outsider is up in court without a fucking clue what’s going on, like I was doing this afternoon. I do know a lot of people, human and otherwise, I do have a lot of contacts; none of them are UVF, UFF, Red Hand Commando, UDA, Ulster Young Militants, Free Men of Ulster, Protestant Action Force, Militant Orange Order, which is MOO and just about the most fucking stupid name for a bunch of loyalist wankers I have ever heard. I don’t know, I don’t care. I’m done with all that. I am certainly not running Shian weapon systems to Loyalist paramilitaries. Jesus Christ, these guys are psychopaths. You want to find the killer, try them. Fucking wired to the moon on this insane Holy Ulster bullshit and Nazi Master Race stuff. They think they’re the Lost Tribe of Israel. Outsiders, Shian? They’d be queuing up to drop the gas pellets on the lot of them.’

A knock, the door opens a crack. Willich puts his head in, beckons Dunbar into the corridor with a twitch of his eyebrows.

‘Result?’

‘It would be a hell of a lot easier without Littlejohn there. He keeps changing my tack; he goes off into all this psycho-killer profile stuff, trying to trick Gillespie into slipping up and confessing that he did it.’

‘Gillespie?’

‘He has a chip on his shoulder about everything. He protesteth much.’

‘His kind always do. Protesteth too much?’

‘Hard to tell. He’s as dodgy as a nine bob note, boss. But he’s not going to give us anything, even with Littlejohn rattling his cage.’

‘He give you anything on this weapon-smuggling line?’

‘He protesteth mightily much about that too. You still think it’s the way to go?’

‘It’s the best we’ve got. This is Ulster, we only have two tricks, the orange one and the green one. Even our crime has to be Unionist or Nationalist. Everywhere else has proper, ordinary murders for good, old-fashioned, classical reasons. Not this place. So why should killing a bunch of Outsiders be any different? No, we’ll go with the gun-running angle. But a wee word: don’t push Gillespie too hard. There’s a whole operation out there; if we charge him, they’ll vanish. Give him about another ten minutes, then let him go. We’ll stick twenty-four-hour surveillance on him, see where he goes, what he does, who he talks to.’

‘Who’re you getting?’

‘We’re stretched, Rosh. This kind of thing is not what the accountants want to hear about at this stage in the fiscal year.’

‘You mean me.’

‘I mean you. And Darren Healey, and Paul Connor. And I want to know everything; when he takes a shit, how many sugars he has in coffee.’

Roisin Dunbar sighs the police-mother, scratched dining table, husband’s - professional - jealousy - eight - hours - day - behind - a - wheel-watching sigh.

‘It’s a bitch,’ Willich says. ‘Remember, ten minutes, then you let him go.’

He walks off down the corridor, deftly side-stepping the puddle of water on the floor beneath the leaking sprinkler.

Andy Gillespie is watching the local television news and learning about anger. The two are related. It’s a dark, wet March night; the rain is overflowing the sagging gutter and splattering on to the coal bunker roof. Like that leaking sprinkler in the Pass. Took him all last night to get the hammer beat out of his head. The local television news is talking about the Harridi killings. It’s the lead story. It’s about the only story, now that people have stopped killing each other politically. They’re spinning it out in every direction; they’ve got half an hour to fill. They’ve got local politicians on, giving the response from their parties. The usual political suspects. There’s Peter Robinson, looking like a serial killer himself, stating that the Democratic Unionist Party has always maintained that something like this was bound to happen when an alien and hostile population is foisted upon the Unionist people of Ulster without their consent. There’s David Trimble, with that lemon-up-his-ass look on his face that seems to come with the job of Official Unionist leader, saying that this is an inevitable consequence of the politics of Joint Authority, and that no decent, law-abiding citizen can feel safe in his bed while the killer is out on the streets. There’s John Hume, looking more and more like a boozed-out poet, saying that the SDLP fully supports the efforts of the NIPS to bring the killer to justice and that he hopes that this incident has not done irreparable damage to the on-going political dialogue between the Shian Nations and the constitutional parties. There’s Wur Gerry Adams, in his Barbour waxie and cords looking like the lord of the manor, giving the Sinn Fein opinion, which is that this is a ploy by the Outsider planters on behalf of their British masters to further detract from the real issues of the six counties and destabilize Sinn Fein’s presence in the Joint Authority process. There’s M’Lord Alderdice, going love, man; peace, man; let’s all sit down together and think about this rationally and ascertain what the real problem is, not rush off at the mouth in hysterical over-reaction; as if rationality, love and peace, man, ever had anything to do with Ulster politics. And there’s Pastor McIvor Kyle, that evil little man, giving the Ulster Democratic Front position, which is that they’re all maniac pervo killers, the lot of them, and Ulster would be better off without them, and if the UDF held power, they would shove the lot of them back into their rocket ship and send them back into the sky.

What are these fucking jokers doing on my television? Talking about something they know nothing about? Something they don’t want to know about? What has this got to do with them? Anywhere else this would just be a murder. In this country, a new Sainsbury’s opens, a cat has kittens, a cow farts, and they wheel the politicians on for the Reaction of the Parties.

‘Jesus God!’ he shouts, but it’s not the politicians using five deaths to score party political coup that he’s angry at. It’s not even because the police need a name in the frame and his sounds better than anyone else’s. That’s their nature, like it’s the nature of Shian to hunt, and dogs to piss on gates, and Andy Gillespies to be suspects. He doesn’t like it, but it can’t hurt him. They’ll see that he didn’t do it, that he couldn’t have done it.

He’s angry because he’s helpless. Because five people
—
people, not Outsiders, not planters, not aliens
—
that were the closest thing he has to a family died while his back was turned. A moment’s inattention, a brief look away, and they died. He’s crucified himself for the wasted moments: if he’d eaten somewhere else, if he hadn’t had that fight over the table, if he hadn’t had that coffee refill. If he’d gone straight to the Spar instead of checking the pharmacy first. If he hadn’t dithered over whether to get the Guinness or the Caffrey’s. If he hadn’t decided to take the scenic route back, and been there those few minutes earlier. But he did what he did and none of it can be undone. The universe won’t give you any moments back.

He’s angry because when he got out he swore that no Outsider would ever suffer again because of anything he did or did not do. He took what he swore to the Harridis, and told them why he had come, and they accepted him and the thing he’d been given and they gave him family. And now they’re dead. Like that, too quick for his slow feelings to understand what has happened and move him into positions of shock and grief and loss. Anger, that’s all he has. Angry that they have been taken away in a moment. Angry that the police suspect him because they haven’t tried to understand what he felt for Muskravhat and Seyoura and Senkajou. Littlejohn just wanted to make it cheap and dirty, the well-thumbed page that the text book on sexual deviations falls open at. Angry because he couldn’t do anything then, angry that the police have assumed all rights to do anything now.

You have the makings of a
genro
in you, Andy,
Seyoura had said just before the invitation to the party that never was.

Genro.
No real word for it in English. Knight-advocate is the usual translation; good on the sense of valour and questing for truth and right, but it can’t catch the spirit of the Shian law it embodies; of personal right and the absolute commitment of the lawyer to defend those violated rights. A kind of loving. A marriage of client and advocate.

Rights are rights whatever your native species,
she had said. They are inviolable for everyone, or they aren’t rights. You don’t have to be a Shian to practise the Shian law.

But he’s only Andy Gillespie of Hatton Drive, Woodstock Road, Belfast, ex-con, car mechanic, with a gift of tongues. He wouldn’t even know how to start.

You are making excuses, Andy,
she had said, almost last of all.

Andy Hero. Knight-advocate.

At least he’ll be looking in the right directions. At least he won’t be following big smelly presumptions up his own ass. At least it’ll show the police that he wants to find out as much as they who killed them.