In the Morning I'll Be Gone Page 6

  “Yes, it looks like he has had a couple of trials and—”

  “That’s his second wife, of course, his first wife died, car crash, he was driving. Three sheets to the wind, they say, although that’s just what I heard.”

  “What? Carter killed his wife in a vehicular—”

  “Well, I won’t keep you, Mr. Duffy, your phone’s been ringing off and on for the last hour. Someone’s looking for you.”

  I went inside, made a cup of tea, put on some nerve-calming Delibes.

  I got the phone on the fourth ring.

  “How was your first day back?”

  “It was fine, Kate,” I told her.

  “Have you made any progress locating our friend?”

  “Not . . . as such. This was more of a settling-in day.”

  “I see.”

  “Anything from your end?”

  “Nothing. He’s not calling home or sending letters home and there’s no trace of him anywhere. Frankly I’ll admit that it’s got some of us a little rattled.”

  “He’s biding his time. When he shows his hand it’s going to be something big. Dermot knows his history. I remember him telling me once that it was the King David Hotel bomb that got the Brits out of Palestine.”

  “True. But it was Gandhi who got us out of India a year earlier.”

  “Dermot’s no Gandhi,” I said.

  “No, he isn’t. So what’s your plan of attack?”

  “Nothing special. I’ll just start interviewing people.”

  “When?” she pressed me.

  “You’re hassling me a wee bit, aren’t you?”

  “Because they’re hassling me. We all have our bosses.”

  “How about tomorrow? I’ll go up to Derry to see his mum and his sisters, and his uncle’s not a million miles away. They won’t tell me anything, but all I can do is ask.”

  “Derry?” she asked.

  “Aye.”

  “You want me to join you? I’m in Rathlin. It’s not a million miles away either.”

  “You live on Rathlin Island?”

  “I have a house here. It’s been in the family for a long time and it’s better than sleeping on the base, I can tell you.”

  “Don’t you have better things to do than attend a wild-goose chase?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Dermot’s mother lives in a bad area. The Ardbo Estate. This will sound dramatic, but I couldn’t guarantee your safety, Kate.”

  “I can look after myself.”

  I thought about it for a moment. It was always useful to have a partner who could pick things up that you couldn’t. A female partner was even more useful.

  “All right. I’ll meet you at the Ballycastle ferry car park at nine. Will that give you time to get over?”

  “Yes.”

  “See you then.”

  I made beans on toast for dinner and watched the TV news.

  Things were quiet. A couple of attacks on police stations. A few fire bombs left at shops in Ballymena. It looked like the Libyan boys were still waiting to make their presence felt and I knew they wouldn’t wait forever.

  I set the alarm for six, checked under the BMW for bombs, and ran it up the coast to Ballycastle. Driving rain made the road slick and dangerous on the clifftop sections but I kept the Beemer at a quare old clip anyway.

  Kate was waiting for me at the Ballycastle ferry car park.

  She was wearing a long black wool duffel coat and a black beret tilted to one side. It was fetching. It made her look young. Twenty-something. Fashionable. On her way up.

  “You live on Rathlin Island, then, right enough?” I said, pointing across the Irish Sea to the L-shaped island five miles from the mainland.

  “Yes.”

  “I never met anybody who lived on Rathlin.”

  “Well, several hundred people do.”

  “Is it not inconvenient for an MI5 agent?”

  “Not in the least. There’s a regular ferry service. Phone line. Electricity. Views to die for, of course.”

  “And safe too, I imagine,” I said.

  “Oh yes. Safe. There hasn’t been a murder on Rathlin in a couple of hundred years. Of course, that was a multiple murder. The massacre of the entire population . . .” she said, and smiled.

  “Well, get in. It’s probably best if you don’t say anything. I’ll introduce you as . . . Not sure that I caught your second name?”

  “Use my mother’s maiden name. Randall.”

  “OK. I’ll say that you’re Detective Constable Randall but if you speak with an English accent the jig will be up.”

  “I can do an Irish accent. My father’s old Anglo-Irish gentry.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I’m sure you’re great but it’s probably best if you keep your gob closed.”

  She got in the car.

  “Your parents live around here, don’t they?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We can drop in on them if you want.”

  “I don’t want.”

  “Gosh, you’re all business, aren’t you?”

  “Aye, I’m all business. When I’m on a case I’m on a case.”

  I fumbled in my cassette box and put on the B side of Kind of Blue.

  Miles Davis is usually a way in to someone’s musical background, but Kate didn’t object, hum along, or make any other comment. Instead it was the same intense, stony “I’m just stepping outside for a moment” stiff upper lip.

  I wasn’t impressed. She was trying too hard.

  We drove along the busy A2 to Portstewart. The rain was elemental and you couldn’t see a thing—a shame, because on a fair day this was the most attractive part of the coast. I kept us on the road through Coleraine and Limavady, where I finally stopped at a little café I knew.

  “Are you hungry?” I asked Kate.

  “I might be,” she said, looking skeptically at the place, which was just a bog-standard roadside joint.

  “They do a mean Ulster fry when Suzanne’s working and you can always tell when Suzanne’s working because her Vincent Black Shadow is parked outside.”

  “Is that thing over there a Vincent Black Shadow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Is the fry the specialty of the house?” Kate asked.

  “Aye.”

  “I’ll try it, then.”

  “My treat,” I insisted.

  We went inside. I ordered two Ulster fries and two teas. I grabbed an Irish News and a Newsletter and we sat in a booth by the window. I read the sports news and Kate the proper news.

  Our fries came: potato bread, soda bread, pancakes, eggs, thick pork sausages, fatty bacon, black pudding—all of it pan cooked in beef dripping.

  “I don’t think I can eat this,” Kate said.

  “And a round of toast!” I yelled to Suzanne.

  Kate nibbled at the toast but I needed to get some weight on so I got most of the fry down my neck.

  The rain hadn’t let up so we ran out to the car, almost going over into the mud. We drove on and were in Derry just after ten.

  For the thousand years before the Normans had come to Ulster late in the twelfth century this had been the territory of the O’Neills, a particularly fierce and independent people. The English settlers had renamed the city Londonderry and survived a famous siege in 1690 by King James’s Catholic armies. After 1690 east of the Foyle had remained a Protestant, English city and west of the river had become Catholic Derry. The city, tragically, had remained divided between Catholic and Protestant ever since. We drove into the Catholic Bogside, which can be an intimidating place for outsiders what with the IRA murals and the maze of estates. Not for me, though, even though I was a peeler and they would have kidnapped and killed me at the drop of a hat. I had gone to school here and I knew the town and its ways inside and out. It was good to be back, in fact. Belfast would never feel like home, but Derry . . . yeah, I could handle Derry.

  We drove through the Shantallow Estate with its rows of grey houses, street u
rchins, bonfires, burnt-out cars, and welcoming AK-47 motifs on every gable. Then it was across the A515 to the Lenamore Road and the Ardbo Estate.

  Just a mile from the border with Donegal in the Irish Republic, this place was basically unpoliceable. The RUC and the British Army claimed that there weren’t any no-go areas in Northern Ireland but I’d be surprised if the writ of Queen’s law ran true here.

  Unemployment was well over fifty percent and the houses were hastily built low-rise and terraced jobs owned by the biggest landlord in Europe, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive. Not that that was any kind of a boast. A third of the homes were boarded up or otherwise derelict and the rest were in various states of disrepair. Gangs of children and packs of stray dogs roamed the neighborhoods. Garbage and old clothes lay strewn or stacked in little Charles LeDray–style pyramids. All the trees that had been optimistically planted on the estate were gone to bonfires, and the menagerie you saw through the windscreen included horses and goats, which had been let loose to graze on the landscaping between the brown low-rise tower blocks.

  Some kind of empty factory was an eerie red shell to the west, and to the north there was the strange, looming presence of the Donegal mountains.

  “If you want to bottle out of this, I can turn us round easily,” I said, seeing the look on her face.

  “I’m not remotely worried,” she lied.

  Once upon a time this had been a sought-after place to live. A bold, gleaming 1960s slum clearance project, and it had stayed that way for a few years at least. Derry had largely escaped the worst of the Troubles until that fateful day: Sunday, January 30, 1972, when British Army paratroopers had overreacted to reports of an “IRA sniper” and shot dead thirteen unarmed people during a civil rights march.

  IRA recruitment had soared overnight, and within months vast tracts of Derry had been effectively ceded to the paramilitaries.

  “Look in the glove compartment. There’s an address on a piece of paper. What’s it say?” I asked Kate.

  “22H Cowper Street.”

  “OK, Cowper Street. I think I know where that is.”

  I drove deeper into the Ardbo Estate, through crumbling tower blocks and terraces, until I found Cowper Street. I wasn’t enjoying the look the kids were giving me as I drove my BMW past them. Thirteen-year-old boys with mullets, spiderweb tattoos, and denim jackets who would just love to steal and joyride a car like this.

  None of the houses had numbers and I had to drive round the loop twice, which was plenty of time to attract attention. I finally realized that No. 22 was a four-story tower block constructed from cinder blocks and a dirty, slate-colored concrete. Windows had been put in on all the lower floors and graffiti told me that this was the territory of the Irish National Liberation Army—yet another of the many nationalist paramilitary sects.

  I parked the BMW outside No. 22, got out, and waited for the pack of kids to approach.

  “Say nothing,” I mouthed to Kate. “And try not to make eye contact.”

  “I live here, Sean. You’re treating me like I’m a green lieutenant on his first tour of duty in Vietnam.”

  “This isn’t Rathlin Island, love. Just do as I say, OK?”

  The roving gang of boys approached.

  I gave two pound coins to the tallest and meanest of them, who was going with the skinhead/denim jacket/hobnail boot look and who happened to be carrying a piece of wood with a nail sticking out the end of it.

  “There’s ten quid more in it for you when I get back, if, and only if, there’s not a scratch on this vehicle,” I told him.

  He sized me up and nodded. “Aye, I’ll fucking see to it,” he said.

  I thought it was about a fifty-fifty shot whether he’d steal it or guard it.

  “All right, let’s go,” I said to Kate.

  There was a slight twitch to her lip, which might have been the first sign of nervousness she had exercised that day.

  “The Francis Hughes Hunger Striker and Resistance Fighter Memorial Block,” No. 22 Cowper grandly called itself.

  Over the entrance there was a massive graffiti mural of a paramilitary gunman holding a Kalashnikov in one hand and an Irish tricolor in the other as he led an assorted group of refugees through an apocalyptic landscape. It was actually rather good, rising above the naive primitivism of most gable murals to become something that was convincingly terrifying.

  I went inside, holding my nose against the stench of urine.

  I found a heavily graffitied floor plan and saw that 4H was a corner flat on the fourth floor.

  I walked jauntily toward the lift. My years of police training were not required to ascertain whether it worked or not. The elevator shaft was a gaping hole with smashed machinery, garbage, and a pram lying at the bottom of it. If there’d been a live or dead baby in the pram I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  We found the stairs and walked to the fourth floor. The architect had assumed that the stairs would be seldom used, for they were narrow and dimly lit through broken windows. They stank of vomit, beer, rotting leaves, and garbage. The occasional black, shoe-sized stain was not the mold I first suspected but, in fact, dead, decaying Norwegian rats.

  Kate had the sense not to say “charming” or anything like that. This transcended her acute English sense of irony.

  We got to level four and took a breather.

  “Are you quite sure MI5 is intercepting the mail for this place? Services seem pretty basic around here to me,” I said to her.

  “If this is Dermot’s mother’s place, I can assure you that we’re reading her post and tapping her phones.”

  “If you say so,” I muttered, and wondered what MI5 agent would have the balls to come out here to INLA central, break into Mrs. McCann’s flat, and install a phone bug—if indeed that was how you installed a phone bug.

  We walked along a dank, dark corridor and knocked on the door of flat 4H.

  “Who is it?” a woman asked.

  “Police,” I said.

  “Fuck off!” the woman said.

  “It’s about Dermot,” I said.

  There was a pause and some discussion and finally the door opened. Dermot’s ma, Maureen, was slight, about five one or two, a fragile wisp of a thing with her hair in a greying black bob. Her eyes were hazel, her lips red, her skin like grease paper. I’d seen screen vampires with more color in their cheeks. She was in her fifties now and clearly she didn’t remember me, although I’d been to Dermot’s old house in Creggy Terrace half a dozen times when I’d been a kid.

  “What about him?” Maureen asked.

  “Could I come in, Mrs. McCann?”

  “What about Dermot? Is he dead? Have youse topped him?”

  “No. We haven’t. Can I come in?”

  “Are you the police right enough?”

  I showed her my warrant card.

  “I’ll give you five minutes of my time and not a minute more.”

  We went inside.

  The flat was large, tidy, and well maintained, but stank of cigarette smoke, booze and quiet desperation. There was a spectacular prospect to the northeast of Donegal, Derry City, and Lough Foyle.

  “Who is it, Ma?” Fiona McCann said from behind an ironing board in the kitchen.

  Fiona was two years older than me, and I remembered her from my visits to Dermot’s old house. Back then she’d been extremely beautiful in a way that other Derry girls weren’t. In a way Irish lasses weren’t. Her complexion was dark and her eyes were dark and her voice had been deliberately modeled on Janis Joplin’s. There had always been something exotic about her (and the whole clan come to that). The exoticism of fallen aristocrats, or exiled royals adrift in a far-off land. Fiona had gone to America for five years, worked as a nurse, had a kid, left her husband, and come back to Derry just as Dermot was going inside, her father was dying of congestive heart failure, and her other brothers and sisters were leaving for anywhere else. Not exactly the brilliant move of the decade that one.

  “It’s t
he polis, they’ve come to talk about Dermot,” Mrs. McCann said.

  Fiona looked up from the ironing board. Her red hair was streaked with white and there were deep crevasses in her cheeks. She looked fifty or even sixty and I wondered whether she was using the big H. There was a fag-end hanging out of her mouth and she was already lighting another in anticipation of the first one dying.

  “They haven’t lifted him, have they? Is he all right?” she asked.

  “We haven’t lifted him. He’s still on the run,” I said.

  Fiona’s eyes narrowed.

  “Is that you? Sean Duffy?”

  “It’s me. And this is Detective Constable Randall.”

  “Fucksake. Sean fucking Duffy! Coming round here asking about Dermot,” Fiona said, practically spitting the words from her mouth.

  “Is that wee Sean Duffy?” Mrs. McCann asked in a more welcoming tone, before adding, “Would you like a dish of tea?”

  “I wouldn’t say no, if it’s no trouble, Mrs. McCann,” I told her.

  “Ach, it’s nay bother. Have a seat. Have a seat. What about you, love, tea?”

  Kate shook her head. “No thank you,” she replied.

  We moved aside a stack of slim poetry books and took a seat on a cushion-less sofa.

  Fiona turned off the iron, stubbed the first cigarette out in a full Rothmans ashtray, walked across the room with the fresh one, and sat opposite us on an upturned plastic delivery box that served as a living-room table.

  “I heard you joined the police. Couldn’t believe it. How do you sleep at night?” she asked.

  I’d been asked this question so many times I had a prepared set of responses with ascending levels of sarcasm (depending on my contempt for the interrogator), but this was not the time or place for those. I ignored the query and asked: “How come you’re living here? What happened to your house on Creggy Terrace? That was a lovely place.”

  It was too. Light filled, airy, five bedrooms . . .

  “Ach! They burned us out!” Fiona explained.

  “Who?”

  “Who knows? UVF, INLA, UDA . . . what does it matter? The house is long gone.”

  “Was this after Dermot went inside?”