Gun Street Girl (2 page)

The surf tosses the Zodiac upside down.

“This is the police, you are surrounded, cease firing at once!” the men are ordered through the megaphone. But blood has been spilled and they respond with a fusillade of machine-gun fire. I light another ciggie, touch St Michael, and make my way to the car park.

I walk past the rows of Land Rovers and get in my car. I turn the key in the ignition and the engine growls into life. Radio 3 is playing Berlioz. I flip to Radio 1 and it's a Feargal Sharkey ballad—Feargal Sharkey's successful solo career telling you everything you needed to know about the contemporary music scene. I kill the radio and turn on the lights.

A box of ammo explodes with a deafening blast and an enormous fireball that I can see from here. I lean my head against the steering wheel and take a deep breath.

A very young constable in charge of car park security taps on the driver's-side window. “Oi, where do you think you're going?”

I wind the window down. “Home,” I tell him.

“Who said you could go?”

“No one said I had to stay, so I'm leaving.”

“You can't just leave!”

“Watch me.”

“But . . . but . . .”

“Move out of the way, son.”

“But don't you want to see how everything turns out?” he asks breathlessly.

“Farce isn't my cup of tea,” I tell him, wind the window up, and pull out of the car park. The me in the rear-view mirror shakes his head. That was a silly remark. For out here, on the edge of the dying British Empire, farce is the only mode of narrative discourse that makes any sense at all.

2: A PROBLEM WITH MR. DWYER

Fireworks behind. Darkness ahead. And if that's not a metaphor for the Irish Question I don't know what is.

Once I was off the slip road I drove insanely fast on the A6 until the carriageway ran out at Glengormley. From Glengormley it was just a short hop up the A2 to Carrickfergus. It was a cold, wet, foggy night which discouraged both terrorists and the British Army's random roadblocks, so the run was relatively easy; and fortunately, I didn't kill myself doing 110 mph on the stretches of motorway.

I got back to Coronation Road in Carrick's Victoria Estate at just after 1:20.

In the middle-class streets after midnight all was quiet, but out here in the estates there could be
craic
at any hour. The
craic
now was two doors down, where a bunch of lads were drinking Harp lager, eating fish and chips, and playing what sounded like Dinah Washington from a portable record player on a long lead outside Bobby Cameron's house. Bobby had clearly hijacked the owner/operator of a mobile chip van and forced him to provide food for him and his mates. Bobby was the local paramilitary commander who also ran a two-bit protection racket and dealt unexcised cigarettes and drugs. His stock had been low for years around here but lately had risen because, with the assistance of the Glasgow Orange Order, he had kidnapped back and deprogrammed a Carrickfergus girl from a branch of the Unification Church in Scotland. The Moonie temple had been burned to the ground in the incident and half a dozen Moonie guards had been shot in the kneecaps. “Stay out of Scotland and Northern Ireland!” was the message the crippled security personnel had carried all the way back to Korea. It was a big win for Bobby and now you sometimes heard people muttering that if “you want something done, don't go to the police, go see Bobby Cameron,” which was exactly the sort of thing that the paramilitaries loved to hear.

Our eyes met. Bobby looked a bit like Brian Clough, but Brian Clough after a three-nil home defeat to Notts County.

“You're a wanted man, Duffy,” Bobby said.

“Oh yeah?”

“Didn't you have your police radio on?”

“No.”

“We've been listening to the scanner. They've been looking for you, Duffy. Miss Marple's not available so why not the intrepid Inspector Duffy, eh?”

“Thanks for the tip,” I said and locked the car.

“You want a fish supper?” Bobby asked. “I'm paying.”

I walked over to the chip van and looked at the driver, an older man with an abstract sadness about him. “I'm a police officer. Are you being held against your will or coerced to be here tonight?”

“Oh no, not at all,” he said quickly. “I'm just doing Bobby a favor.”

I didn't know whether I believed him, but he didn't look afraid for his life, which was something. “In that case I'll take a sausage supper.”

The other diners moved aside to let me get to the chip van window. It was quite the collection of crooks and ne'er-do-wells, and when my life becomes a BBC drama the casting director will love this little scene as an opportunity for showcasing his ugliest and weirdest extras.

The hijacked chip man gave me a sausage supper wrapped in newspaper and I thanked him and offered him a quid.

“On the house,” he said, and gestured toward Bobby.

I ate a chip or two. “How was Scotland?” I asked Bobby.

“You heard about that?”

“Interesting fact. The Reverend Moon was raised as a Presbyterian. The Moonies are basically radical Korean Presbyterians.”

Bobby shook his head. “I won't debate theology with you at two in the morning, Duffy, not when you've got a busy night ahead of you, but I will say that the problem with you Catholics is that you don't understand the Protestant religion.”

“No?”

“Unlike your Church, which is a top-down faith—Pope, cardinal, bishop, priest, congregant—ours is a democracy. Our ministers, our moderator, our elders, and our congregants are all equal. That's why the
Reverend
Moon, as you call him, could never be considered a Presbyterian, cos he sets himself above his flock.”

The Jesuits had beaten the Counter-Reformation dialectic into me to such an extent that even at this unholy hour I could have martialed half a dozen arguments against Luther, Calvin, and the other heretics, but I was just too weary for any of that now. “Maybe you're right. See ya,” I said, and went inside my house.

I turned on my pager and carried the phone into the living room. If they really were looking for me they'd keep trying until they got me.

I got some ice and poured myself a pint glass of vodka gimlet and put on the best album of 1985 so far: the much-delayed release of Sam Cooke's
Live At The Harlem Square Club.

I drank half the pint and cranked the volume on “Bring It On Home,” which built to the vibe of an old church revival. When I was sufficiently solaced I dialed the station. “Duffy,” I told Linda at the incident desk.

“Thank God, Inspector! Chief Inspector McArthur has been looking for you.”

“I'm not supposed to be on tonight. Sergeant McCrabban is duty detective.”

“Chief Inspector McArthur specifically asked for you. He's been very insistent. Where have you been?”

“I was up in Derry. I just got in. I'm shattered. I really need to go to bed, Linda, love.”

“I'm sorry, Sean, but the Chief Inspector has been pulling his hair out. He's got a real situation on his hands. He's asked for you specifically.”

“Where is he?”

“Uhm, the, uh, the Eagle's Nest Inn on the Knockagh Road . . .” she said with more than a trace of embarrassment.

“McArthur is there right now?”

“That's what I've been led to believe.”

“And he's got himself into some kind of trouble?”

“I'm not, er, privy to the details, Sean.”

“All right, if he calls again tell him I'm on my way.”

“Do you know where it is?”

“Uh, yes, I've been there before . . . in a professional capacity.”

“Of course.”

I scarfed another couple of chips, pulled a leather jacket over my jeans and sweater, and went back outside. Bobby and his cronies were playing petanque with scrunched-up beer cans, and Mickey Burke was walking his aged toothless lioness on a leash at the other end of the street, something he promised me he would stop doing.

“Ah, they found you, Duffy!” Bobby said triumphantly.

I held up a finger to tell Bobby I'd deal with him in a minute.

“Mickey, what have I told you!”

“Just getting her some air, Inspector Duffy,” Mickey said apologetically.

“Get her back inside! We've discussed this!”

“She's got no teeth, she's harmless and—”

“Get her inside!”

Mickey hustled the full-grown lioness back indoors.

“There should be a law against keeping lions in a council house,” Bobby said, his face now like Brian Clough after he'd found a dead bluebottle in his Monster Munch.

“There should be,” I agreed, and looked under the BMW for mercury tilt bombs.

“There's no point doing that, Duffy. We've been standing here the whole time. No one put a bomb under your car.”

“How do I know you didn't put a bomb under my car?” I replied, and kept checking under the chassis.

“You're my pet copper, Duffy. I wouldn't kill you.”

I ignored him, finished the search, and opened the car door.

“And besides, if I wanted to kill you you'd already be dead, mate,” Bobby added.

“Shortly followed by you, pal. I've seen to that,” I told him with a wink.

I drove out of Victoria Estate and along the Greenisland Road to the Eagle's Nest Inn, which was halfway up Knockagh Mountain.

The B road became a private road that wound its way through light woodland and then a broad piece of manicured parkland before it arrived at a seventeenth-century Scottish baronial house overlooking Belfast Lough. The house was converted in the seventies into first a hotel, then a spa, and was now a high-class brothel. It was all completely illegal, of course, but the owners paid off at a level so elevated that you'd need a Sherpa to get close to them. A criminal investigation out here would suck you into some really heavy shit: Internal Affairs, Special Branch, the local MP, government inquiries . . .

I parked the Beemer next to two Mercedes Benzes and a Roller.

I was met at the entrance by a bright young man in a three-piece suit with a name tag that said Patrick on it, which was a likely story.

“Are you Inspector Duffy, by any chance?” he asked in an English butler accent which also sounded bogus.

“Yes.”

“If you'll come with me, please,” he said.

He led me through the building in a manner that can only be described as a kind of fastidious, subdued panic.

I followed him up a wide oak staircase to the second floor. There were pictures of horses on the wall, hunting scenes and the like, all originals or pastiches of Stubbs and John Frederick Herring. Chandeliers illuminated the corridor and light classical music was playing from discreet speakers. It was a chilly, unerotic environment, but they probably thought that was what the well-heeled punters wanted. Hell, maybe it
is
what they wanted. Maybe the madam had handed out questionnaires.

There were several male bouncer types waiting for us at the top of the stairs. They pointed at an open door and we went inside Room 202, to quite the little diorama.

A half-naked young man was sitting on the floor with blood oozing from a wound on his scalp. He was crying and being attended to by a bald man in a bathrobe and another much younger man in jeans and a sweatshirt. A girl wearing a basque and black stockings was sitting in a chair by a writing desk. An older woman in a harsh red wig was sitting next to her. A glum-looking Chief Inspector McArthur was sitting on the edge of the bed. Behind them all there was an open French window that led to a balcony, an elaborate fountain, and a manicured lawn.

Peter McArthur was my new boss, new being the operative word here as he'd been the station commander at Carrickfergus RUC only for about six weeks. On paper he was very much the high flyer: Cambridge University, Hendon Police College, a Chief Inspector at the age of only thirty-one, but in person he was less impressive. Long nosed, weak chinned, and a dreamy, soft vagueness to his girlish, brown eyes. He was Scottish but the fey New Town Edinburgh type rather than Glasgow roughneck.

“Thank heavens, Duffy, where in the name of God were you?”

“Derry. Special Branch op.”

“I can't have you gallivanting off to Derry. Can't you see we're in big trouble here?”

“There are plenty of constables at the station.”

“Uh, loose lips sink ships. This is, uh, a rather delicate matter, don't you think?”

“I can't tell what the matter
is
yet, sir.”

The man in the sweatshirt got up and looked at me. “And who is this?” he asked in a pleasing American accent.

“Inspector Sean Duffy. He's the head of our CID unit. You can trust him.”

The man looked dubious.

I raised my eyebrows at the Chief Inspector.
What the hell is going on here, Chief
?

McArthur lowered his voice as a stab at some kind of intimacy. “Look, Duffy, you've been around longer than I have, what are we going to do? I don't want to pass it up the chain. Not yet. It doesn't have to become a big issue, does it?”

He was sweating and looking anxious in his sharp brown suit and crimson tie. McArthur was only about three calendar years younger than me, but he avoided the smokes, the sun, and the booze, so he looked about twenty. And if he was already out of his depth here I'd hate to see the eejit in a real emergency.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. “Perhaps you could apprise me of the situation, sir?”

“Ach, I'll tell ya, so I will,” the girl said in a chainsaw West Belfast argot.

“All right. What happened, love?” I asked her.

“The gentleman and I were about to get down to business. And he said I should have some . . . 
rocket fuel
, he called it. I said no. He said come on and try it; it would make us go all night. I said no. He gets all eggy and starts screaming and yelling and I says, right, I'm calling security. He goes bonkers and tries to bloody choke me and I pick up the lampshade and clock him with it.”