Hang on St. Christopher (The Sean Duffy #8)

1. Never Go To Belfast In July

CHAPTER 1

NEVER GO TO BELFAST IN JULY

No Alibis bookshop was packed. All eight seats were filled, and six people were standing at the back. Ciaran Carson came out of a side room with a mug of tea, a few sheets of A4, and a book of poems. He was wearing a dark-blue suit, white shirt, and red tie. He was a trim, confident man with short black hair and oval glasses. He looked like a scholar of ancient languages, which, of course, he was.

He said good evening and launched into his first poem:

“Suddenly as the riot squad moved in, it was raining exclamation marks,

Nuts, bolts, nails, car keys. A fount of broken type...”

The event went very well. Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Muldoon were in the audience, and everyone else was a serious poetry geek or wannabe writer. “It’s like when the Pistols played Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall in here tonight,” I wanted to remark to someone, but none of this crowd would have understood what I was blathering on about.

Carson read from The Irish for No and Belfast Confetti and from his brilliant translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge .

Questions were called for, and the usual Ulster embarrassed reticence descended upon us.

“What are the difficulties of translating Irish verse into modern English?” I found myself asking, and after the launch of this frail bark, I was quite relieved to get only good natured responses from Carson and then Heaney and then a funny and scholarly aside from Muldoon.

I got a couple of books signed and walked out, well pleased, onto Botanic Avenue.

It was early yet, only seven o’clock, and my ferry was at midnight. Maybe a quiet pint in the Crown Bar or Kelly’s Cellars? Maybe a film?

I found a phone box and called Beth in Portpatrick.

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Hey, how are you?” she asked.

“Fine. I went to that poetry reading.”

“Was it good?”

“Very good.”

“What are you doing now?”

“Just killing time. I’m booked on the midnight boat.”

“How were your days at the station?”

“Really, really boring.”

“That’s to be expected.”

“Yeah, it is.”

I came in to work six days a month now, which was the minimum you needed to do to get your full benefits and pension when you retired. I usually did three days in a row, then took two weeks off to be a stay-home dad in Scotland; then I got the ferry over and did another three days. Until a year ago, doing boring paperwork had only been my cover, because I’d really been a case officer in charge of handling an IRA double agent in the police, who we’d turned into a triple agent working for us: feeding the IRA false intelligence and trying to pick up tips. But the stress of playing for us and them had finally taken its toll on Assistant Chief Constable John Strong, who had a coronary event in his back garden, where he’d been pruning his pear tree with a chainsaw. The chainsaw had avoided killing him, but it had laid waste to several of his prized garden gnomes before the cutoff switch kicked in.

It had taken him an hour to die out there, gasping for breath in the summer heat among the severed heads of his gnome army, and those of us who knew about his crimes and betrayals had considered that justice.

He’d been buried with a full RUC honor guard, and a couple of days later a small, masked IRA team had fired a volley of shots above his grave to salute “one of their own.”

But now with Strong dead, the fake paper shuffling had become actual paper shuffling. As a part-time policeman, I couldn’t do any proper detective work anymore, so it was admin and the occasional bit of traffic duty for yours truly until that glorious day August 31, 1995, when I could retire with a full twenty-year RUC pension. If I could somehow survive these working conditions until October 31, 1996, I’d get a full pension at the higher long-service rate.

We’d see about that.

Get out as soon as I could, was my instinct.

“Boring is good,” Beth said. “I like to hear that it’s boring. Boring means you’re not on riot duty or on foot patrol along the border.”

“I’m not up to any of those things,” I said. “I have the doctor’s note to prove it. My knees are too creaky for riot duty and foot patrols.”

“Are you going into the station tonight?”

“I am. Briefly. I have to hand in my time sheet.”

“Say hi to Crabbie and Alex for me.”

“If they’re in, I will. How’s Emma?”

“She’s great.”

“Can I talk to her?”

“She went to bed early. I can wake her up, though.”

“No, don’t do that. Let the wee lassie sleep.”

“Do you want me to wait up for you?”

“No, you go on to bed too. I promise I’ll be quiet when I come in,” I said. The new SeaCat ferry from Larne to Stranraer in Scotland took only an hour to cross the North Channel, so if all went well, I could be in my bed in the house in Portpatrick by one thirty in the morning.

“Okay, love you, Sean... bye!”

“Love you too.”

I hung up the pay phone and walked to the cinema on Great Victoria Street.

It was a big multiplex with many options to choose from. Strangely, four of those options were Irish-themed films: Far and Away, starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman; Patriot Games, starring Harrison Ford; Cal, starring Helen Mirren; The Crying Game, starring Stephen Rea. Far and Away was the story of a conflicted Irish rebel who runs off to America to escape the evil Brits; Patriot Games was about a conflicted Irish rebel who tangles with Harrison Ford and the evil Brits; Cal was about a conflicted Irish rebel who kills an evil Brit and falls in love with the dead man’s girl; The Crying Game was about a conflicted Irish rebel who kills an evil Brit and then falls in love with the dead man’s girl, who then turns out to be a bloke. The only thing funnier than Brits doing Northern Ireland was Hollywood doing Northern Ireland so Patriot Games definitely had the greatest potential for camp comedy. The Crying Game was the most artistically interesting, but I’d been lifted in an IRA honey trap myself, and the whole thing was a bit too close to home.

I decided to have that quiet pint in the Crown Bar instead.

A well-poured pint of Guinness in the well-worn snug at the back of the beautiful Crown Bar, Belfast, is for many people their idea of heaven come to this earth. But I was undergoing my habitual end-of-duty existential event and wasn’t quite so chill.

It was the misfortune of many veteran police officers to acquire a messiah complex and go through the youthful temptations, the missionary journeys, the revelations, and finally the agony. Definitely the agony stage now for me. With the death of my double agent, I was a useless part-time peeler in the police reserve. Paperwork, chickenshit, and beat duty were how they punished part-time over-qualified coppers who came in only a few days a month.

I was in the snug at the back right of the Crown when I heard the unmistakable whoosh of Molotovs whistling through the air and exploding in petroleum fireballs as they hit the street.

I got up and walked down to the long red-granite public bar. “What’s going on, John?” I asked the big barkeep.

“Some sort of riot. The police have blocked the Orange Order march on the Ormeau Road, so they’ve come out with the old bricks and bottles. Fun and games, you know?”

This was what Belfast was like every July nowadays.

It used to be that the Orange Order could march anywhere they wanted in Northern Ireland and the cops would protect them, but in the past few years the police had been trying to be more even-handed and wouldn’t let the Orangemen parade through heavily Catholic parts of Belfast. Sometimes, the Orange Order and their sympathizers would take the diversion off their traditional marching route with equanimity, but other times they’d try to force the police roadblock, the police would resist, and there would be a riot. Often, Catholic neighborhood watch groups would come out to attack the Orangemen, and the police would get sandwiched between the two groups of rioters and then everyone, as they always did, would attack the cops.

As an off-duty, part-time detective inspector, perhaps it was my duty to see if I could help.

Stuff that.

I ordered another pint of Guinness and went back to the snug. I read the Ciaran Carson poems I’d bought, and a new book of verse by Paul Muldoon. It was a pleasant enough way to spend an hour, drinking Guinness by the fire while cops and rioters battled in the streets.

When I was done with my beer and went outside, things were ominously quiet.

Helicopters (police and army) were hovering over the west side of the city, and everywhere was smoke from burning tires and vehicles. A brand-new Mercedes, dull and ignominious in death, was upside down near the cinema. Dandified men in balaclavas and denim walked proudly over the median on Great Victoria and Glengall Street.

I looked for the RUC and discovered them pulled way back out of the trouble zone, behind a cordon of Land Rovers at Belfast City Hall. Glistening in their shields and helmets, they were the bristling Theban legions on the parched fields of Leuctra.

I smiled at this romantic notion, but actually this was pretty disturbing.

If the peelers were way back there, who was in charge of the streets?

I soon found out.

I walked to the multistory car park near the cinema and discovered that the security barrier had been torn down, the guy in the pay booth was long gone, and several cars from the first level had evidently been nicked. Car thieves the world over loved Beemers, so I was pretty relieved to find my black 1991 325i still in one piece. Yeah, I know, I go on about the BMW 3 series, but this beast could do zero to sixty in seven and a half seconds, and 145 on the motorway, and sometimes in a crisis situation it was good to know that you could do 145 mph on a motorway.

I looked under the Beemer for mercury tilt switch bombs and, finding none, got in.

I put the key in the ignition, and the engine and the radio kicked to life. Nirvana came out of the stereo speakers. Say what you will about Nevermind being a compromised punk album with Pixies, Rainbow, and Boston riffs, but it was still good to hear decent music again on BBC Radio 1 after a decade of synth and bubblegum-pop darkness. And although in the UK the bestselling albums of the summer were still Simply Red, Annie Lennox, and Michael Bolton, it meant something that in the US Nevermind had knocked Michael Jackson from the number one slot on the Billboard chart.

I’d driven about half a mile on Great Victoria Street before I encountered the first paramilitary roadblock. A dozen men in balaclavas had thrown burning tires across the road and were preventing vehicles from heading north. They were wearing matching denim jackets and were armed with aluminum baseball bats, knives, and machetes, and at least two of them had sawn-off shotguns.

I couldn’t see exactly what was going on ahead of me, but it was obvious what must be happening. The paramilitaries would be interrogating every driver at the roadblock. If they liked the answers the driver gave to their questions, they would let them go; if they didn’t like the answers, they would order them out of their car, hijack the vehicle, and make the driver walk home.

I looked to see if I could do a U-turn, but the traffic behind me was dense with evacuees.

Everyone was trying to get out of the city. The police and army were nowhere to be seen.

It was something of a tight spot. If the paramilitaries were Protestant and they found out I was a Catholic, they would order me out of the car and they might try to kill me. If the paramilitaries were IRA men and they found out I was a Catholic policeman, they’d order me out of the car and almost certainly try to kill me.

That was Belfast in July: a poetry reading, a quiet pint of the black stuff, a lynch mob armed with baseball bats and guns...

The car in front nudged forward toward the roadblock. The acrid stench of burning tires came in through the vents. Où sont les burning tires of yesteryear? Everyone on this street was time-traveling and PTSD-ing. All those previous bonfires and riots in seventies Belfast, eighties Belfast, and now nineties Belfast.

I suppose I could have gotten out and made a scene and tried to arrest the lot of them. And if I were one of those crusading cops from off the telly, that’s exactly what I would have done. But that wasn’t my scene.

The car ahead was let through the roadblock, and now it was my turn.

A chubby man in a balaclava leaned in and tapped the driver’s-side window with gloved fingers. He was holding an Armalite assault rifle. His mate had a 9mm pistol.

“Wind your window down!” he said.

I wound the window down and turned the radio off.

“Yes?” I inquired.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Who’s asking?”

The man turned to a shadowy figure behind him in a gray denim jacket, who was holding a pump-action shotgun.

“He’s asking who’s asking,” the man said.

“Who’s he to be asking us?” the man with the shotgun said.

“I just want to know if you’re IRA or UVF. I can tell you’re not the police,” I said.

The man with the shotgun came forward and slapped the windscreen.

“We’re doing the bloody questions!” he said.

All the other men at the roadblock turned to look at me.

Jesus, I had screwed this up already with my big mouth.

The man with the shotgun had arms covered with tattoos too ineptly done to read. His pudgy lard-colored neck, however, was holding up a gold chain with Ulster in block letters. He was, therefore, a Loyalist paramilitary. They were all Loyalist paramilitaries. UVF or UDA. A delicious shiver of pure fear made its way slowly down my spine. If they were in a particularly bad mood and looking for a random Catholic to kill, I could be their man for today.

I was armed, of course, but a six-shot revolver against a dozen men holding shotguns and M16s? Not much of a contest there.

If they did lift me and take me away with them, I had one card up my sleeve—almost literally.

Ever since the occasion two years ago when an IRA cell had tried to execute me on the high bog, I had secreted a razor blade and a lock pick in the left sleeve in a specially tailored pocket of my favorite leather jacket. If they handcuffed me and took me away, I’d at least have a last-gasp chance. But if they just decided to shoot me in the street like a mad dog, I’d have no bloody chance.

“Now, pal, answer the question. Where are you going?” the first man asked, putting his big muddy boot on the Beemer’s shiny blue bonnet and pointing his pump-action shotgun at me.

I reached for my gun. Stuff the last-gasp shit—I was going to shoot this arsehole if he kept messing with my wheels.

“Carrickfergus,” I answered truthfully.

“Carrickfergus?” the man with the gun repeated.

“Aye.”

“That place is a shithole,” Pump-Action Shotgun declared.

I did not reply.

“Well, what do you say to that?” the man insisted.

“Even if I worked for the Chamber of Commerce, I’d be reluctant to contradict a man pointing a shotgun at me,” I said to a mirthless silence.

“Where in Carrickfergus?” the first man wondered.

“Coronation Road, Victoria Estate,” I said.

“Victoria Estate, did you say? Do you know Bobby Cameron?”

“I know Bobby very well.”

“What’s he look like?”

“Like a fat Brian Clough.”

“Ha! Yeah! That’s him. All right, then. You can go. Nice Beemer, by the way,” the man with the gun said.

“Thanks very much,” I said, and drove slowly through the corridor of burning tires.

A man from Carrick who knew Bobby Cameron? Not an ideal victim. If they hijacked my car, I might be able to complain to Bobby, and the complaint would get passed back up the chain...

I was thinking these thoughts when, just another two hundred yards farther on, I was stopped by another illegal paramilitary roadblock.

“Where are you going?” a masked man with an axe asked.

“Carrick.”

“Carrick? They’re all head cases up there,” he said with what seemed to be envy in his voice. Where did you get the car?”

“Ayr BMW in Scotland.”

“Scotland,” he said incredulously, as if I had named a place from the white spaces on a sixteenth-century map bearing the legend “Here be dragons.”

“Scotland,” I said again to reassure him.

“Scotland, eh? What do you do for a living?”

“I’m an accountant.”

“Accountant? Boring bastard, are you?”

That tic of his, repeating the last the last word I said in the sentence, had potential for comedy, but I knew that if I tried any comedy it would not go well for me or, in the end, for him.

“Yes. I’m quite the boring bastard.”

The axeman laughed. “Boring bastard. This is probably the most excitement you’ve had all year, eh?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Aye. I knew it. Go on, then, get out of there before you shit your pants!” he said, and all the other masked men laughed. This was probably the most excitement they’d had all year as well. A chance to exercise power over men and women driving home from work, men and women with actual jobs, men and women who drove fancy cars...

After the third roadblock, I decided to get out of the city west rather than north. Exit through the Catholic neighborhoods, where the UVF wouldn’t have the nerve to string burning tires across the road.

I headed down Divis Street and the Falls Road.

Up Sebastopol Street and Odessa Street.

Quieter here. This district guarded by men in doorways wearing long coats...

Above me, there was a noise like Lemmy from Motorhead clearing his throat, which, in fact, was an army Chinook helicopter flying low over the rooftops. It was only a show of force. There was no way they’d send in the army against those goons on Great Victoria Street. The goons were liable to attack the soldiers, and the soldiers would shoot back, and it would be a goddamn bloodbath.

I finally made it onto the Springfield Road, where there were a lot of ways to leave the city. The mazelike streets and the roadblocks and the aggro had taken their toll. My hands were trembling. I clocked myself in the rearview. Fear in those gray-blue Duffy peepers. Never got used to being afeard, did you? That’s what having a kid does for you. Suddenly, you have skin in the game. Something to lose.

I turned the radio back on, and a song called “Achy Breaky Heart,” by someone called Billy Ray Cyrus, annoyed me so much that the fear vanished by the second go-round of the chorus.

I finally escaped Belfast on the dear old Crumlin Road in the far west of the city. I drove through the relatively benign northern suburbs and pulled in at a quiet-looking cinder-block pub in Jordanstown.

It turned out to be a locals-only joint with tough-looking characters hugging pints of Harp (always a bad sign) and listening to flute-band music from an ancient tape player.

Still, I needed a drink to calm my nerves and quench my thirst. Just a wee half a Bass would do the trick.

I sat on a barstool and caught the barman’s eye.

He was a big lad with a handlebar mustache and a cutoff white T-shirt that showed his jailhouse ink to great effect. The jailhouse ink revealed that he liked his mother, a girl called Denise, Manchester United, and Ulster.

He seemed to be in a foul mood about something, like Van Morrison on any random Tuesday.

“All right, mate? Just a wee half a pint of Bass there, please. I’m off to get the boat,” I said, sticking a fiver on the table. A couple of the locals looked up from their pints and then looked back down again.

The bar had a cigarette machine, but I hadn’t had a smoke in over a year now and I wasn’t going to give those thugs the satisfaction of seeing me fall off the wagon.

“Times are changing, eh?” the barman said wiping down the counter.

“What do you mean?”

“Used to be that if a stranger came into your pub and ordered a wee half, everyone would call him a poof.”

“Aye, and nowadays you only attract a few dirty looks and some tedious conversation from the barman. Half a pint there, pal, and be sharpish about it, I have a boat to catch,” I said.

The barman draped his cleaning rag over his shoulder.

“Maybe you should just sling your hook and go and get your boat, pal ,” he said.

I sighed. Why was everything such a bloody effort in this town?

I was not in the mood for this. Maybe after a few coffees following a morning sorting through parking tickets, I’d be up for a bit of argy-bargy, but not on the downslope of an adrenaline crash.

In the dark comedy of my life, I wondered how best to play the scene. The easiest thing would be to leave. Just take my money and go. The second-easiest thing would be to flash my warrant card and make him pour the bloody drink. But as old Marcus Aurelius was wont to say, “Πρ? ?ργου γ?νεται τ? το? ?ργου το?του ?φεκτικ?ν κα? πρ? ?δο? τ? τ?? ?δο? τα?τη? ?νστατικ?ν.” Yeah, I know, just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? He said a lot of things, but the gist is, what stands in the way becomes the way.

So I decided I wasn’t going to flash my police ID or leave. No, the barman and his cronies had just become a special project of mine.

I slid the fiver closer and bent over the bar toward him.

“You seem to have mistaken me for someone else, pal.”

“This is my estab?—”

“I want you to do me a favor and look into my eyes and tell me what you see there,” I said slowly and clearly.

“What?”

“Look in my eyes. Take a really good look and tell me what you see there.”

“Are you some sort of fruit?”

“Look at me.”

Reluctantly his eyes flicked up and met mine. He also had greeny-blue irises with a hint of dark in them. But his dark couldn’t match my dark. I was not a man who habitually got dicked around with, and I had already been dicked around quite enough today.

I let him get a glimpse of all the men I’d killed and all the men I’d hunted and all the men I’d put away.

You didn’t get to be a barman—even in a place like this—without learning a little something about human nature.

He saw.

He knew. I might be north of forty, I might be only a part-time cop, I might be getting soft in the middle, and I might not have worked a case in a year, but I was the scariest bastard he was going to encounter in a long time.

I smiled at him and relaxed.

The movie of my life cut from close-up to the two-shot. He took a step back, removed a clean glass from the rack, and poured the half a pint.

“On the house,” he said.

“Thanks very much,” I said, and drank it in one.

All this aggression and sectarian strife—can’t he see, can’t we see, that they love us at one another’s throats? I went outside to the Beemer, looked underneath it for bombs, and got in.

I turned on Radio 1. “Coming up Michael Bolton, Kylie, and Simply Red.”

Yeah, so much for the musical revolution. I killed the radio and gunned the Beemer along the A2 to Carrickfergus Police Station, where, incredibly, there was a murder case waiting for me if I wanted it.