Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) Read online

  It belatedly dawns on me. This is a Christian burial. She was a Christian. All that Hindu mythology had been what? A pose? An embrace of the exotic in dyadic, sectarian Ulster.

  Oh, Victoria. We are so similar. Can you not see, you there, the rain hammering off your coffin top, your brothers stumbling on the earth. We are so alike. You, the third child, the last born, the youngest. You and I, both of ancient peoples, alien here in this atavistic god-intoxicated land. You and I, the punch line of a joke. We both have failed. You are dead and I am a specter of a man. I look away. Down from the Knockagh, the forest and the beginnings of the town.

  Stand still and gaze anywhere but the fourth row.

  The cemetery is pitched on the high ground above the main body of Carrickfergus. Winds coming down from the Antrim Plateau and up from the lough. John complains about the rain and he and Facey move discreetly toward the lone tree.

  “We commend to Almighty God our daughter,” the priest must be saying. “Ashes to ashes.” And they try to lower the coffin but the rainwater has caved in earth on either side of the grave, and it won’t go down. Mr. Patawasti asks them to try again. They attempt it three more times but she will not go.

  I remember that. Stubborn, proud, the only dark-skinned girl in a school of six hundred. Captain of the debate and field hockey teams.

  Everyone is getting soaked. Mr. Patawasti says that that’s enough. He walks off with his two sons and the uncle and my da and other members of the disbanded cricket club. Great solace you will be, Da. Don’t think I didn’t see you sneak on your yarmulke. Hypocrite. Did you say Kaddish that previous burial? Did you convince us that she would live again, somehow? Did you offer us one ounce of comfort? “Your mother’s gone for good, but her memory lives inside of us.” I needed more than that, you bastard. They walk right past me. And oh God, Mr. Patawasti is coming right over with Da. I back up against a gravestone. I want to run. He opens his mouth to say something but he doesn’t. His face is torn apart, his eyes vacant. The skull showing beneath the skin. He looks like the subject of the funeral, not one of the mourners. It’s horrific. He stares at me for a second and then the party moves on. Dad looks at me and nods.

  They make their way back to the cars. I stand in the shelter of the tree, shaking, waiting for the weather to break. The gravediggers leave, the cemetery keeper leaves. The coffin sits there by the grave, rain pattering on the name plaque and the memories. I walk over. The wreaths, a dozen or more. The biggest one from America: “From all at CAW, fond memories of a wonderful person—Charles, Amber, and Robert Mulholland.”

  I look down the pale lough. I can imagine the Viking boats, like this coffin, shaped from pine or spruce. A boat carved from pine dissolving into the bog of the next world.

  “Come on,” John says, “we might as well make a dash for the car, this is going to be on all day.”

  “What is?”

  “The rain.”

  “We’ll go to the pub,” Facey says.

  Go to the car, like a sleepwalker. Get in, drive to Carrick. John talking to Facey in the front. Someone has bought the Triumph brand name, will be making them, again. Motorcycles. Nonsense. John, Facey, why can’t you see the ocean of pain around you? Tribulation falling from the skies. Did you ever read the Venerable Bede? Of course not. Life is like a bird at night, flying into a great hall full of feasting, behind is darkness, ahead is darkness, the journey through the wonder, brief, bewildering, awful, done.

  “We’re here,” Facey says, takes the keys from the ignition, turns around, grins, “we’re here.” Aye…

  The fire in Dolan’s was lit and I stood there drying out my wet funeral-and-interview suit. A cold, nasty day but the fire helped a lot. I dried off and got some crisps from the bar. John supplied the information about the Christian burial. The Patawastis had been high-caste Hindus from Allah-abad, India. But Mr. Patawasti and his brother had both been sent to public school in London at an early age and both had gradually fallen under the somnambulant spell of the Church of England.

  After school Mr. Patawasti had gone to Oxford, married an English girl, had two sons, got offered a lectureship in physics and applied maths at the University of Ulster, and had moved to Northern Ireland, just in time for the start of the Troubles in 1967.

  “Maths, eh?” I said to John. Typical. Another thing apart from cricket and vegetarianism he had in common with my da. Cricket, vegetarianism, and maths, surely the three most boring things in the world.

  We talked about Victoria but the boys knew I’d gone out with her and were restrained. I got up to go, Facey offered me a lift. But I was having none of it.

  Soaked to the skin, I arrived at the back door of our house. Dad in the kitchen, nervous, upset. He had changed out of his drenched suit into sweatshirt and jeans. The sweatshirt said “Save the Rainforest” on it and had a picture of a leaping whale. You wouldn’t have thought the rain forest supported many whales but maybe that was why it needed saving.

  “What is it?” I asked him.

  “There’s a man waiting for you in the living room. An Englishman. Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  “Not that I know of,” I said.

  I pulled down the ladder and went up to my bedroom in the attic. Hundreds of my old books. Teenage manifestations. The Catcher in the Rye, L’Etranger, The Outsiders. Records, train sets. I grabbed a dressing gown and sweatpants, sat there, amid the dust. I was glad now I’d come home. I’d had a flat at the marina. I’d done it in pastels, big black stereo, a couple of chairs, minimalism. Not many books. A few choice records and CDs. A guitar. I wanted to impress girls with the Zen-like tranquillity of pure being. No clutter. A lie, of course. Here, despite the filth, I was more at ease. I could pull up the ladder and climb under the duvet and no one would ever get me. I could stay here, and the autumn would come and then the winter. Snow would pile up on the window ledge. I’d stay here, safe and warm until Mum yelled at me and got the hook and pulled down the ladder and brought up hot chocolate and digestive biscuits. Yes.

  I shook my head, rejected the mawkishness, climbed down the ladder, walked across the hall and into the living room.

  A very tall man, six six, two hundred and forty pounds, clothed in a baggy, expensive blue suit with narrow lapels. His face showed worry lines and had a gray, bitter edge to it. He had an oft-broken nose and salt-and-pepper hair. He was sipping tea and looking at the jazz records, the piles of old newspapers and the other shit. Fit and tough, and I would have pegged him for a bouncer or a debt collector if it weren’t for the big mustache, which told me he was a peeler. So—an English cop. A cop from Scotland Yard. He came from the Samson Inquiry. I knew immediately why he was here and why he’d followed me. I knew immediately I was fucked.

  I stuck out my hand. He shook it. Scars over his knuckles. His hand was rough. Christ, this was definitely no desk jockey, or at least he hadn’t always been one.

  I sat down. He opened a briefcase and removed a clipboard.

  “I’m Commander Douglas,” he said with an unpleasant grin.

  “What’s a commander?” I asked him. He looked at me, didn’t know if I was taking the piss or not.

  “In the Met, the Metropolitan Police, it’s the rank above chief superintendent.”

  “Fancy that. If I was still a peeler I’d salute ya,” I said.

  “Well,” he said, baffled, irritated.

  “And you know who I am,” I said.

  “Yes. I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Lawson.” He said it so quietly I could barely hear him.

  “What about?”

  “Well, I want to be very informal, Mr. Lawson. If I’d wanted to, I would have had you arrested, we could have talked in Belfast or in London, tape recorders, lawyers, all that,” he said with a grim little smile.

  If he had meant to put the fear of fucking Jehovah in me, he had. I hid my panic in my beard, stuck my hands in the dressing gown pockets.

  “Fire away, Commander. I’m ready.”


  “You don’t, Mr. Lawson, seem surprised to see me,” he said.

  “Well. Your Keystone-Kop-following-me routine for the last couple of days gave the game away, didn’t it?”

  “Yes, well, I like to keep an eye on a suspect for a few days before I go charging in. You can only get so much from the files.”

  “What do you mean by the word suspect?” I said.

  His smiled widened. Ugly, like a crack in a granite craphouse.

  “What I mean, Mr. Lawson, is that you don’t seem surprised to be being interviewed by a detective from Scotland Yard.”

  “I assume you’re from the Samson Inquiry,” I said.

  He nodded.

  In 1994, after years of pressure from the Irish lobby in America, the British government in London had launched an inquiry into the Royal Ulster Constabulary of Northern Ireland to find out three main things: Was the police force biased against Catholics, was there a shoot-to-kill policy when dealing with IRA men, and finally, was there widespread corruption? They’d put John Samson, an assistant chief constable from the Metropolitan Police—an outsider—in charge and given him free rein to investigate all aspects of the RUC’s operations. Samson had seconded about twenty officers to help him, most also from the Met. Many, many people in the RUC were worried about the inquiry. I’d never shot anyone and I wasn’t in charge of recruitment, so Douglas had to be part of the corruption team. I’d heard that in the last few weeks Samson’s investigation was reaching a climax and he was soon to show his preliminary report to the prime minister. It made me very nervous. I sat on my hands.

  Douglas took a sip of the tea and put down the jazz record. Kind of Blue by Miles Davis. Obviously not a connoisseur, just grabbed the one disc he’d heard of. He had a wedding ring, married, about fifty-five. The right age to be a chief super, so no high flyer he, just a plodding efficient copper, the dangerous type. He had a gun, too. They’d issued it to him. You could see it protruding through his jacket lapel. He gave me a contented look. It scared me.

  “Why did you resign from the Royal Ulster Constabulary?” he asked, lighting himself a cigarette and putting the ash into one of Mum’s long-dead-plant pots.

  “What?”

  “Six good years as a policeman and suddenly you pack it in. Why did you resign from the RUC, Mr. Lawson?”

  Well, Commander, I’d had enough of the police, it wasn’t the place for me. I didn’t want anymore to be part of a predominantly Protestant force, largely seen by Catholics as a repressive instrument. My father, as you probably noticed, is a progressive; me, too. I realized I was in the wrong line of work, I resigned.”

  “I have your dossier. Joined at eighteen, made detective after three years. You know who makes detective after three years? At the age of twenty-fucking-one?

  “No, but you’re going to tell me,” I said, attempting insouciance.

  “No one makes detective at that age. No one. Practically unheard of.”

  “Yeah, they hated the way I saluted them. They wanted me in plain-clothes. Honestly, that was the reason. Buck McConnell told me that.”

  “You were quite brilliant, Mr. Lawson. In Belfast it’s an accelerated learning curve, but even so, a detective at twenty-one? After three years? You were destined for great things. You obviously had mentors. Inspector John McGuinness, Chief Inspector Michael McClare, Superintendent William McConnell. I’ve read all their comments about you.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point, Mr. Lawson, is that you were an outstanding police officer. I pulled your police boards. You finished top of your class. And your IQ test. The top third of the ninety-ninth percentile.”

  “No serious person believes IQ tests anymore. And the ninety-ninth percentile, five billion people on Earth, at least fifty million people with that score. No shakes there, mate,” I said.

  “And your A-level results?” Douglas said with a smile.

  “What about my university results? That throws a spanner in the works, doesn’t it,” I said. “I was a total failure at university. I flunked out in my second year.”

  “Your mother was dying throughout your second year at university. I would say you were distracted.”

  “Well, ok, so I’m the original Jesus Christ, what exactly—”

  “You worked on fourteen cases in your first two years as a detective and all fourteen were broken. That represents a fifty percent higher success rate than the RUC’s norm. You solved two closed-book homicide cases.”

  “Yeah. You know, I’m not being modest here but you’re from England and you probably think the quality of peelers over here is equivalent to what it is over there, but it’s not, mate. Most of the coppers I worked with were hoodlums, drunks, thickos, the other day I was in a bloody bar fight with two of them, it really—”

  “What I’m suggesting, Mr. Lawson, is that you were destined to rise very high in the RUC and yet for some reason, out of the blue, you resigned. I checked, you’d just passed the sergeant’s exam. Hell, you could have been a detective inspector by thirty. It makes no sense. There was no reason given in the report. But I want to know. Why did you resign, Mr. Lawson?”

  “Look. I’d had enough, I had two really ugly domestic violence cases. Murders. I had one where a child was killed. That doesn’t take much solving, but it takes some time to get it out of your head. I had just had enough.”

  “Lies,” he said, stubbing the cigarette violently into Mum’s pot.

  “What?”

  “I am not a very patient man, Mr. Lawson,” Douglas said, angrily.

  “Look it up, that’s in your files. That was my case, Donovan McGleish, had him arrested. Life imprisonment they gave him. In the Kesh. Don’t call me a liar.”

  “You’re too young to be a burnout. That’s not why you resigned,” he said, stroking the mustache. He picked up his clipboard and read something. His cuff went up on his shirt. There was a tattoo on his wrist. A pair of wings. An ex-paratrooper. A hard case. Just great.

  “After two and a half years as a detective constable, you were assigned to the drugs squad,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “Correct.”

  “Did you ask to be transferred?”

  “I did, I told you I’d had enough of homicide.”

  “You solved not one case in the drugs squad, and then mysteriously you resigned.”

  “Not mysteriously, nothing mysterious about it, I had had enough. Many peelers quit after their very first year or blow their brains out. Look up the suicide rate for RUC men, I think you’ll find that it is—”

  “Mr. Lawson, your behavior is just not fucking cricket. But you are going to cooperate with me and I will explain why. As part of the Samson Inquiry, I have extremely wide-ranging powers. Arrest. Summoning before a magistrate, prosecution of uncooperative material witnesses. Contempt of court. You name it. I will have you arrested, I will throw you in jail.”

  Now I was starting to sweat. Not an empty threat. He didn’t make empty threats. I could see it in his eyes. Cold, indifferent. All business. He lit himself another cigarette.

  “There’s an old Belfast rule for when you’re being questioned by the police—whatever you say, say nothing,” I announced, attempting levity. He wasn’t impressed.

  “I’m not sure yet what happened with you, Mr. Lawson, or what you found out in the drug squad, but I do know that a meteoric detective does not suddenly resign for no reason. I will get to the bottom of this and I will make you talk. I want the names and I’m going to get the names. If you were intimidated, we can give you protection.”

  “Protection. Ha. Not as smart as you look. What do you think? I’d uncovered a big bloody plot to flood Ulster with drugs? Some enormous protection racket? You’re way off base, mate. You think they would have forced me to resign and that would have been it? They would have fucking killed me already. There’s no plot, no racket, I don’t know anything. I resigned because I was sick of it.”

  “Who is they?”

  “Wha
t?”

  “You said ‘they.’ Who is ‘they,’ who would have killed you?”

  “There’s no ‘they,’ there’s no mystery. You don’t get it, mate, I resigned because I’d had enough policing for a lifetime. Fed up. Forget your plots, forget your conspiracies. They don’t exist. People like you and Samson believe in the conspiracy theory of history, well I believe in the fuck-up theory of history. Stupid things happen for no reason.”

  Douglas sat for a moment, listened to the sound of the rain on the rooftop. He looked at me and a wave of disgust seemed to go through him. His face contorted with rage. What was he doing here? I knew what he was thinking. These fucking Micks. Even the so-called smart ones, bog stupid. Eight hundred years England had been entangled with this awful place. Eight hundred bloody years. And he was a paratrooper, he’d probably been over here in the army and taken all kinds of shit. This time he stamped his cigarette out on the carpet.

  He seemed to make a decision, got up, came over, grabbed me by the lapels of my dressing gown and pulled them so tight that he was effectively choking me.

  “Now you will listen to me, you Paddy fuck,” Douglas said, leaning in close. His breath stank, he was grinning. I gasped for air.

  “You’ll listen to me, Micky boy. I will fucking break you. I will have you, you Paddy piece of shit. I want the names. I am not someone to be fucked with,” he said.

  “I can’t breathe—”

  Douglas tightened his choke hold, I really couldn’t breathe, seeing stars, blacking out, I grabbed at his big wrists, tried to push them off, but it was no good.

  “Listen to me, bastard, fucking potato head. We will arrest you. We will force you to testify. I personally will make sure you do hard time for whatever it is you’re hiding.”

  Suffocating. Choking.

  “Stop it, I’ll tell you,” I managed to get out.

  He eased up on the stranglehold, let me fall back to my chair.

  “Speak,” he said.

  I took a couple of big breaths.

  All policemen in Northern Ireland go on a survival course, and one aspect is how to respond if you’re kidnapped by the IRA, tortured, questioned. At the first stage of the interrogation you say nothing, then you let them break you to the second stage, where you give them a lie and then, if the torture continues, you let them break you to the third stage, where you give them a story that is nearly the truth but not quite but close enough, so they’ll think that that’s finally it and they’ll buy it. I had already told two stories about my resignation, so unfortunately I was at the third stage quicker than I would have liked. Nearly the truth.