In the Morning I'll Be Gone Read online

  “Yes?”

  “Come up with us to Interview Room 2,” he said.

  “Can you hold on a minute?” I said, and made them wait while I took off my kit.

  I followed them along the concrete corridor to the interrogation room, normally reserved for suspects. They were in there with Constable Jimmy McFaul. Jimmy had evidently spilled his guts about something because there were tears in his eyes and he couldn’t look at me.

  I had no idea what this could be about. The cannabis I had lifted from the evidence room in Carrickfergus? But that was a long time ago and what had Jimmy to do with that?

  “Have a seat, Duffy,” Ginger Tache said.

  “Can I get a drink? I’ve been on foot patrol along the border. Thirsty work, but you proud boys in Internal Affairs wouldn’t know about that, would you?” I said, and went back outside, got a can of Coke from the machine, and put it against my forehead. I popped the can, took a big drink, and joined them again.

  I sat next to McFaul. “What’s going on, Jimmy?” I asked him.

  His eyes were fixed on his boots.

  “Were you driving a police Land Rover on the Lower Island Road, Ballycarry, at approximately nine forty-five p.m. on the night of 20 December?” Black Tache asked.

  “What?”

  “You were the only Land Rover on the road that night. There’s no point in denying it,” Ginger Tache added.

  “Your mate has told us everything. You were on the road and you were driving and you hit someone and you didn’t stop,” the other goon said.

  “Jimmy, you said I was driving?” I asked him.

  Jimmy said nothing and kept looking at the space where his lying eyes intersected with the floor.

  “You hit someone, Duffy. From what Constable McFaul says you didn’t even realize it, but you hit a man,” Black Tache said.

  “Is he OK?” I asked.

  “You knocked him into the sheugh with the wing mirror. He was shook up and he broke a finger, but he’ll live. Twenty-year-old lad on his way back home from football practice. He had his rucksack on his back. You hit that. That’s maybe what saved him from a more serious injury.”

  “Thank God for that,” I said.

  “He’s still going to sue us, though, isn’t he?” Ginger Tache said.

  “I don’t know what the Ghost of Fuck-ups Past here has told you but I wasn’t driving that night. I was in the back of the Rover trying to stop Sergeant McGivvin from choking on his own vomit or puking on my green union suit. Sergeant McGivvin will verify that.”

  “We’ve already asked him. Sergeant McGivvin doesn’t remember anything of the incident,” Black Tache insisted with a sleekit smile. “So, it’s just your word against Constable McFaul.”

  I nodded. So that was how it was going to be.

  “Both of you are hereby suspended without pay until the conclusion of this inquiry,” the big Scottish bastard said.

  “You can keep your gun for personal protection, but you are not permitted to leave Northern Ireland and you are not to report for duty,” Goon No. 2 added.

  Jimmy accepted the verdict and slunk out of the interview room. He had got his story in first. He was the grass and I was going to be the fall guy. In other words I was completely screwed. Ginger Tache sat down in Jimmy’s seat. “I’m Chief Inspector Slater,” he said, offering me his hand.

  I didn’t shake it. I knew this game of old. First the stick, then the carrot up the arse. “What’s all this about?” I asked. “Just tell me the bottom line.”

  “The bottom line? It’s over for you, Duffy. You are not being graded on a friendly curve. You should see your file, mate. Christ on a bike. It’s got red flags all over it. You were lucky not to have been kicked out in ’82. You’ve been on probation ever since,” Slater said.

  “I wasn’t driving the Land Rover,” I said.

  “What do we care? You’re our boy for this month. A nice juicy sergeant. All we need is our quota and you’re it,” Slater said.

  “I wasn’t driving!” I insisted.

  “Your mate Jimmy says you were. He’s clean and we’ve got your dirty, dirty file clogging up the works.”

  I lit a ciggie. “So it’s all been settled, then, has it? I’m the scapegoat?”

  “You’ve been in the RUC, what, eight years?” Slater asked.

  “Closer to nine,” I told him.

  Slater leaned in toward me and smiled an ugly yellow-fanged grin. “It doesn’t have to end in scandal, does it?” he said.

  “OK, give it to me. What’s the deal?” I asked.

  “You’re not eligible for a pension or benefits but we’ll give them to you if you accept full responsibility and quietly resign without this becoming a big deal.”

  “And if I don’t resign?” I asked.

  Slater made the throat-slitting gesture. “Full disciplinary proceedings. Make no mistake: you will be found guilty and you will be dismissed from the force without severance or a pension. And don’t think being a Fenian will save you. In your short, not so brilliant career you’ve managed to piss off a lot of people.”

  I nodded, stubbed out my cigarette on the desk, and got to my feet.

  “I’ll think about it,” I said.

  The New Year. 1984. But there was no Big Brother watching us. No one gave a pig’s arse. Ireland was an island floating somewhere in the Atlantic that all sensible people wanted to drift even farther away, beyond their shores, beyond their imaginations . . .

  The year limped in. The days merged. One morning it was sleet, the next rain.

  I walked the town and when I got home I checked the post to see whether my dismissal papers had come through for me to sign. Carrickfergus was a mess: large areas had been zoned for demolition and reconstruction. It was EEC money and the locals saw it as a good thing, but it wasn’t because it only meant that we were high on the EEC list of Towns That Are in the Shitter.

  I walked the streets and drank in the pub and watched TV late into the night, when it was all public information films warning kids about the dangers of drowning in quarries or lifting up strange packages that were really trip-wired explosives.

  One night the elderly woman across the terrace had some kind of seizure and started screaming, “He’s coming! He’s coming!” Who was coming was never explained, but she had proclaimed it in such a convincing way that a minor panic had ensued and the whole of Coronation Road had come out.

  Another night we heard a two-thousand-pound bomb in Belfast so clearly that it might have been at the end of the street.

  Signs, portents, single magpies, black cats, bombs, bomb scares, helicopter traffic . . .

  Finally one morning a white envelope sitting on the hall mat.

  I took it to the living room and stirred the embers in the fireplace. I lit a fag, took a deep breath, and ripped it open. A boilerplate full “confession” to be signed, notarized, and returned to RUC Headquarters in Belfast.

  The terms were comparatively generous. In recompense for an admission of wrongdoing I would take early retirement and receive a pension, although I hadn’t put in enough time.

  I read through the document twice, poured myself an emergency Glenfiddich, and signed everything that needed to be signed.

  At nine I went into Carrickfergus and found Sammy McGuinn, my barber, who was also a notary public. Sammy was the town’s only communist and it was he who had turned me on to the strange delights of Radio Albania. He read the document and shook his head. “I know you don’t see it now, Sean, but this is a very good thing. As a member of the police you were nothing more than a lackey in a tyrannical government oppressing the will of the people. A Catholic too! Smart lad like you.”

  “It was a job, Sammy. A job I was good at.”

  “Power is bad for the soul!” he said, and went on to talk about Lord Acton, Jurgen Habermas, and the Stanford Prison Experiment.

  “Yeah, could you just notarize the form for me, Sammy?”

  “Of course,” he said and added his
seal and signature while muttering something about Thatcher and Pinochet.

  “I can see you’re down, I’ll throw in a haircut,” he said, and put on the happiest music he could think of, which was Mozart’s symphony number 40.

  Mrs. Campbell saw me coming out of the barber’s: “In getting your hair done, Mr. Duffy?”

  “I don’t get me hair ‘done.’ I get it cut,” I replied dourly.

  I crossed the street to the post office, bought a first-class stamp, fixed it to the return envelope, mailed the letter, and just like that I was off the force.

  Time moved on. Days to weeks. Weeks to months. Cold February. Damp March. As Ezra Pound says, life goes by like a field mouse, not even shaking the grass. Usually I went to the library and read the papers: parochial news, fossilized editorials, a narrow frame of reference. I sometimes checked out classical LPs and did nothing until six o’clock when it was seemly to get quietly hammered on Polish vodka or County Antrim poteen, listening to Wagner or Steve Reich or Arvo Pärt. Strange millennial music for strange millennial times.

  I went to the dole office and they told me that there was no point signing on. With my retirement money coming in I would be means tested and would not be eligible for any other kind of income support. The unemployment officer told me I should move to Spain or Greece or Thailand or someplace where my monthly check from the RUC would go a long way.

  I felt that this was good advice and I got a few books on Spain out of the library.

  I walked the streets. Observed. Observed like a detective. Kids playing football. Kids painting death’s-head murals on gable walls. Fiddle players and cellists outside the bank busking for coppers. Men in the High Street offering to recite you any poem you could think of for the price of a cup of tea.

  One evening in the pub I got into a fight. Standard fare. Old geezer bumped me. I said excuse me, pal. Out came the fisticuffs. I got him with a left and before I knew what was happening the bastard had jabbed me five times with his right. Chin, stomach, kidneys, stomach again . . . He must have been sixty if he was a day. He helped me to my feet and bought me a drink and spun me a yarn about winning a middleweight belt and training John Wayne for his performance as an ex-boxer in The Quiet Man. It was a likely story but I was so addled I couldn’t tell whether it was legit or bollocks . . . I went home in a taxi, drank a vodka gimlet, took 10 mg of Valium, half a dozen aspirin and went to bed.

  In the wee hours I woke and looked at the aspirin bottle next to me and wondered whether this had been a cowardly, half-hearted suicide attempt. Cowardly because I still had my service revolver, which as an ex-policeman I was allowed to keep for up to a year after I’d left the force. That was the way to do it. Point blank with a hollow-point .38 slug straight across the hemispheres.

  My guts ached and I walked to Carrick hospital and a surprisingly full waiting room. Lynchian post-midnight bus station characters. The Open University on a black and white TV. A beardy physicist: “Life is a thermodynamic disequilibrium but entropy will take us all in the end . . .”

  Yeah.

  My guts were killing me so they put me on a drip. The doctor on call said that I would live but that I wasn’t to mix my medicines. He gave me a leaflet on depression. I went home, wrapped the bed sheets around me, and went onto the landing. My newly installed central heating had sprung a leak and the repairman had said that he needed to get a part from Germany to overhaul the whole organ-like apparatus. It would take weeks, he explained, maybe over a month, so I’d rented another paraffin heater and in truth I liked it better. The paraffin heater was my shrine and I bathed in its warmth, its sandalwood aroma, and the light of its magenta moon.

  I lay before it and let the hot air wash over me like a blanket.

  A long time ago I had killed a man with a heater like this.

  No. Was that me? Did such a thing really occur?

  Or was it a fragment, a dream . . .

  Oarless boats . . . Dream ships . . . The half-light of the wolf’s tail.

  Dawn.

  I went downstairs.

  Rain. Sky the color of a litter box. An army helicopter skimming the dogged brown hills.

  I caught a glimpse of myself in the hall mirror. I was skinny, scabby, pale. My nails were long and dirty. My hair was unkempt, thick, black, with grey above both ears and on the sideburns. I looked like the poster boy for an anti-heroin ad. Not that I’d go that route. Not yet. And speaking of the exotic gifts of the Orient . . . Wasn’t there a . . .

  I rummaged in the rubbish bin under the kitchen sink and found a roach with an inch of cannabis still left in it. I made a coffee and topped it with a measure of Black Bush. I went back into the living room, searched among the albums until I got the Velvet Underground & Nico. I put on “Venus in Furs,” drank the coffee, lit the roach off the paraffin heater flame, and inhaled. Paraffin. Hashish. John Cale’s viola. Lou Reed’s voice.

  Revived somewhat, I went outside and picked up the milk bottles. There was a strange car four doors down on the Coronation Road bend. A white Land Rover Defender with two shadowy figures inside. A man and a woman, she in the driver’s seat. I made a mental note of the car, popped the top off the gold-topped milk, and poured it into my coffee mug. I stared at the car and drank. It began to drizzle from a dishwater sky.

  “Jesus is Lord!” another one of my enthused neighbors yelled as a morning greeting. I took a final look at the car, closed the door, and went back into the living room.

  As I lay down, Lou Reed sang of weariness and being able to sleep for a thousand years. The music ended, the stylus lifted, moved an inch to the left, and the song began again.

  There was a faint creaking sound from outside. Someone at the gate. The post or the paper or—

  I grabbed the revolver from my dressing-gown pocket and checked that it was loaded. But somehow I knew that the people in the Land Rover were not going to be terrorist assassins . . .

  I heard voices and then a confident rap on the door knocker.

  I went into the hall, looked through the fisheye peephole every cop had installed as a necessary precaution.

  The man was a tall, balding, slightly harassed-looking guy who would make an ideal “innocent bystander injured in shooting” story for the news. He was wearing a blue suit and his shoes were shined to autistic levels of perfection. He was about twenty-five. The woman was brown haired, pale, thin, grey eyed. Somewhere around thirty. No lipstick, make-up, jewelry. She was wearing a black sweater, a short black skirt, and black low-heeled shoes. She wasn’t pretty, not classically so, but I could see how some men would lose their heads for her (some women too). There was an intensity, a self-possession to her that was uncommon.

  I put the .38 back in my dressing-gown pocket and opened the door.

  “Mr. Duffy?” the man asked with an English accent.

  “Yes.”

  “May we come in for a moment?”

  For just a sec I wondered whether they were, in fact, a really good hit team. It would be the sort of thing a really good team would do. Ask whether they could come in and when the door was safely closed and your back turned, plug you . . . but they were almost certainly those English Jehovah’s Witnesses that I’d heard everyone complaining about down at the fish and chip shop.

  “Aye, go into the living room, just to the right there. Do you want tea?”

  Both of them shook their heads. Perhaps, like Mormons, they didn’t drink tea or coffee.

  “Are you sure you don’t want any? The kettle’s on,” I shouted.

  “No thank you,” the woman said.

  I made myself a mug, poured a packet of chocolate digestives onto a plate, and carried it back into the living room.

  She had taken the leather chair and he had been relegated to the sofa.

  They took a biscuit each. Missionaries didn’t deserve the Velvet Underground so I put on Lou Reed’s fuck-you masterpiece, Metal Machine Music, an album of feedback loops and screeching guitars.

  “Do we have t
o have the music?” the man asked.

  I nodded. “Of course! In case they’re listening,” I said.

  “In case who’s listening?” the man wondered.

  I pointed vaguely at the sky and put my finger to my lips. I sat down, dipped a chocky biscuit in the tea, and ate.

  “So . . . Jehovah,” I said.

  “Who?” the man asked, and blinked so slowly you wondered whether Lou Reed had given him a mini-stroke.

  I brought the teacup to my lips and nodded at the lass. I looked into her strange pale eyes and suddenly remembered that we had met before.

  I froze in mid-drink. You know poker, don’t you? So you know what it’s like when you’re playing Texas hold ’em and you’re sitting there with a three and a five off suit and it’s the big blinds and you’re short stacked and the dealer spreads the flop and it’s a two, a four, and a six . . . and just like that you’ve gone from the shit-box seat to the bird-dog seat in the blink of an eye. The blink of a bloody eye . . .

  And now I was feeling slightly foolish sitting here in my dressing gown and fluffy slippers.

  “We’ve met, haven’t we?” I said to her.

  “I don’t think so,” she said in a refined English accent with an ever so slight foreign echo to it.

  I got up and turned off Mr. Reed. “Oh yeah, we’ve met before. Not a hundred yards from here in Victoria Cemetery, in 1982. You left me a note about a case I was working on. You’re MI5, aren’t you?” I said.

  Neither of them had any idiosyncrasies that would render them vivid but that was the point, wasn’t it? I had only seen her for a fleeting moment and her hair was a different color, but it was her. The fact that I was right was communicated only by a momentary eye twitch and a slight pursing of the lips.

  “Any chance of getting some names?” I asked.

  “I’m Tom,” the man claimed.

  “And I’m Kate,” the woman claimed.

  I took a big gulp of the sweet tea and set it down on the coffee table.

  “So, Tom, Kate,” I began. “Exactly how badly are you fucked and why do you think I can help you get un-fucked? There are plenty of coppers. Plenty of good coppers. What is it that I bring to the table? Eh?”