Time for Duffy and crew to get working.
We told the Chief Inspector we were running down leads on the PO robbery and started doing leg work. We took Selden and Strong’s photographs to the crossbow shops, but no one remembered either man. At the Rangers Club the barman liked the look of Strong as the tall man in the flat cap but wasn’t completely convinced it was him and “wasn’t completely convinced” was not something you could take to court.
We tried to look up the coroner on the McKeen–Devlin deaths but that old complacent lying bastard had died ten years previously.
We ran the missing persons reports on Mrs Deauville but there was no give there either.
We discreetly accessed John Strong’s personnel file but all that was in there was a hagiographical ascent to glory.
We looked into the possibility of exhuming Patrick Devlin and examining the wounds on his body but the family wasn’t in the country any more and an exhumation was not something you could keep quiet about. And even if we did pull up poor old Patrick Devlin from his final resting place, only a pistol shot in the back of the head could possibly be strong enough probative value to indict a high-ranking policeman – every other gunshot wound could be turned by a good lawyer into the kind of wound you get in a melee from running a roadblock. Attempt to take down Strong with evidence like that and we’d be blowing up all our careers and putting our lives in jeopardy. The exhumation of Patrick Devlin would have to be a last desperate roll of the dice.
We did finally find Harry Selden’s “stolen” car burnt out and forensically dead in a wrecker’s yard in East Belfast. No help at all on that score.
Days like this.
Nights like this.
The Troubles simmered in the background, an entire generation scarred by the brutal murders of the two corporals and the three IRA funeral mourners on live TV.
Throw in the “punishment” shootings and the firebombings and the attacks on cops and soldiers.
Old news now. Most of that stuff wouldn’t make page one of the Irish papers and wouldn’t get mentioned at all in the British ones.
My old gaffer and one of John Strong’s mentors, Superintendent Bertie Hare died of coronary heart disease. Dress uniform for his funeral in the rain at Victoria Cemetery. ACC Strong didn’t show up. Busy man. A Church of Ireland priest telling the men gathered round the grave that he was “confident in the resurrection of the flesh”.
I was glad someone was confident.
Fortunately we had a few real minor cases that allowed us to hide the big case: a shoplifting gang, joyriders, coal thieves.
March advanced into April.
Beth grew more and more agitated at her parents’ house. More and more depressed about living in Ulster at all. “That house Dad’s building for us feels like it’s a prison.”
“Then we won’t move in there.”
“But Northern Ireland feels like a prison.”
“Ulster as existential prison. I’ve had those thoughts. Many times.”
“They do my exact masters course at Glasgow University. It’s better, actually. They have teachers there who’ll let you do comic books as well as contemporary fiction.”
“Glasgow University? Sounds good.”
“I’d transfer my work done. I could finish the whole thing in under a year.”
I’d lost one girlfriend to a Scottish uni. Could I lose two? That’s the way history goes, says Nietzsche. Wash and repeat. Until all feeling is gone and everything fades into nothing. Wash and repeat.
Walking insomniac around Carrickfergus.
Down Coronation Road, Barn Road, Taylor’s Avenue. The dream engine spilling vowels on Victoria Estate. An audiobook on my Walkman. Poems. Berryman. Huffy Henry and Amy Vladeck. Huffy Henry and Louis MacNeice.
Others lines from other poems:
The blots on the page are so black they cannot be covered with shamrock …
The falcon cannot hear the falconer …
And this from the opera the dead couple in 1968 did not get to see:
Frisch weht der Wind/Der Heimat zu
Mein Irisch Kind/Wo weilest du?
Where indeed?
He was out there, like a spider at the centre of a web. A dangerous opponent. One mistake, one false move, and me and Lawson and Crabbie were all going to go down. How can you mess with a man who has the IRA and the police on his team?
Even a clown like Dalziel assumes a new light. You’re an eejit, Kenny, a complete fucking eejit, but at least you’re not a traitor.
24: DRIVING MUSIC
Belfast does weather well. Especially rain.
One night I grabbed the lock-pick kit, the Glock and the raincoat and walked down the path of 113 Coronation Road in a downpour from Ezekiel 38.
Lightning danced around the occult chimney at Kilroot and the yellow cranes above the dry dock at the shipyard. Thunder boomed across the lough. I looked under the BMW for mercury tilt switch bombs but the brave boys who plant such things were all abed tonight.
It was late.