17. Young Lochinvar’s Return
CHAPTER 17
YOUNG LOCHINVAR’S RETURN
Pale, blond, skinny, eager, smart—Lawson looked exactly the same after his holiday in the sun.
“Spain, you say?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Was it raining the whole time?”
“No, sir.”
“No, it wouldn’t be, would it? The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain, so I’ve been told. And you were on the coast.”
“Exactly, sir.”
“Well, you’re the only person I’ve ever met who has come back from Spain whiter than when he left.”
“I did put on a lot of sunblock admittedly, sir.”
Lawson was pleased to see me, but I could tell that something was up. And that something was pretty obvious. It was a hell of an awkward situation. Lawson was the gaffer of Carrick CID. It was his department and his show. But now he apparently had to work with Sergeant McCrabban, who was the same rank as he but had a decade of seniority on him. And worse, he had to work with me, an inspector, a full rank above him and with even more seniority.
Lawson let go of my hand.
Here come the fireworks, I was thinking, but Lawson was cut from a different cloth than the other jokers around here.
“Listen, sir, I was thinking about this. Until this investigation runs its course, how about if you reassume temporary command of Carrick CID? I know it’s my manor now, but it’s going to be a bit weird if I take over this investigation. You’re a DI, after all.”
“You’re a good lad, Lawson. A very good lad. But... well... there have been a few developments since last we spoke.”
I told him about the Brendan O’Roarke connection, about Special Branch taking over the case, about the second murder, about the chief inspector saying that he didn’t want to pay Crabbie and me.
“So you see, Lawson, there’s not much for us to do here anymore. Our case has effectively been absorbed into a wider Special Branch investigation, and we’re out on our ear.”
“Oh, I wasn’t aware of that, sir. I’m sorry.”
“No need to be sorry. Not all of us need closure. Some of us are content with open-textured endings, you know?”
“If you say so, sir.”
The office door opened, and a grinning Chief Inspector McArthur burst into the room.
“Lawson! You’re back! Well done. Well done!” he exclaimed, shaking Lawson’s hand with delight.
“Yes, sir, I’m back,” Lawson agreed.
“It’s good to see you, son. Good to see you. It hasn’t been easy in your absence. But we managed.”
“Yes, sir, with the able assistance of DI Duffy, sir.”
“Oh, yes, of course. Duffy,” McArthur said, seeming to notice me for the first time. “And I suppose you’ll be heading on now, Duffy.”
I nodded. “Yes, I suppose so, sir. I don’t have a case.”
“No more overtime for either you or Sergeant McCrabban!” McArthur said, practically laughing with delight. “You should see some of the memos I’ve had about that from Inspector Dalziel. Whoa!”
“I can imagine, sir,” I said.
“Well, I’ll let you two catch up. No need to call in on your way out. See you next month, Duffy!”
“Yes, sir.”
McArthur left the office with a spring in his step and a happy tune on his lips.
I looked at my watch. “Well, I’ll let you get on with the paperwork if you want, Lawson.”
“Yes, I expect there’s a lot of it, sir... Unless you want to go out for a drink, sir? Maybe give Sergeant McCrabban a ring?”
I shook my head. “No, that, er, won’t be necessary. Me and John are not exactly... we’re not on the best of... No, er, I have to head home. I’m catching the morning ferry. I better do some packing.”
“Whatever you say, sir. How is life over the water, sir?”
“It’s a different world, son. Different vibe completely. When I’m done with my time, I don’t think I’ll come back.”
“How long have you got until retirement?”
“Not quite two years and that’ll be my twenty.”
I know what Lawson was thinking: By the end of my twenty I wanna be chief constable, not some broken-down part-time inspector...
I said my goodbyes to Lawson and drove home.
Ferry tomorrow morning, it would have to be. Too shattered to pack up all my stuff this evening.
Just drive home and have a cup of tea or take a nap or something.
But in the five minutes it took me to get from Carrick Police Station to Coronation Road, there had been a development in the case.
The phone was ringing as I walked through the door.
“Hello?”
“Sir, it’s me,” Lawson said.
“Yes?”
“Well, I thought you might like to know that Superintendent Clare’s team found a black Norton Commando burned out about a mile from the murder scene in South Belfast late this afternoon.”
“It was about time our boy got rid of that bike. He should have done it before now,” I said.
“Yes, sir, well, now he has.”
“Thank you, Lawson. You best tell Crabbie. It was his case too.”
“I will, sir. Good night, sir.”
I hung up the phone and turned on the heat. It was raining again and cold. Maybe Crabbie would care about the Norton, but the information didn’t move me much now.
Not my case.
Superintendent Clare’s case.
Good luck catching this bastard.
This murderer of assassins.
He was good. Very good. I shivered at a recollection of the crime scene and remembered that this guy had been in my house too. Maybe could have killed me in my sleep if he’d wanted. But he hadn’t been ordered to kill me. And he was a man who stuck to the plan, wasn’t he?
Who else was on his kill list?
“Forget it, Duffy. Like you said, not your case. Someone else’s problem now.”
I was thinking about making that cup of tea when a car pulled up outside the house, blaring the Sex Pistols.
It was 1992. Who played the Sex Pistols in 1992?
I looked out the window to find out.
Oh my God, do these eejits ever learn?
Now I had to make another one of those difficult decisions: gun or hurley stick?
Both, I think. I stuck the Glock down the back of my jeans and went out to the washhouse to get my old hurley stick.
I took off my jacket and shoulder holster, went back in the house, stretched, and opened the front door.
They were piling out of their car now. Nice car. Volvo 240 estate. Orange one. Wasted on them. I like the 240 because you can you look through the headrest when you’re reversing. Good Swedish touch, that.
There were four of them.
Pete Scanlon, the paramilitary thug from the other night; Jonty Reed, the Nazi-loving video-recorder thief from the other night; and two more disposable henchpeople, alas not wearing red shirts. They’d obviously come to teach me a lesson I would never forget... Or, more likely, they’d come to fuck up my house because they thought I was supposed to be back in Scotland.
I walked down the garden path.
I was so fed up with this whole scene now.
One iteration was okay.
But two?
It wouldn’t do. It’s a fine line between interesting repetition and boring tautology. Look at the career of Bach or Bob Dylan...
I saw the curtains twitch and close next door. She wasn’t going to be impressed either, was she?
I yawned.
The sun was still shining in the long Ulster summer twilight. Stray dogs were lying in the middle of the road, kids were playing soccer and kerby. It was a lovely sepia-toned Super 8 suburban dream of a night...
Nice.
“Ahoy, there!” I said jauntily with the hurley stick over my shoulder.
“What are you doing here?” Jonty Reed asked, surprised to see me.
Yes, their intelligence had told them I was supposed to be away, and they had come only to fuck up my house.
“I could ask you the same question,” I replied.
Jonty looked at Pete uncertainly, but Pete was made of sterner stuff. “We’re here to learn you,” he said unironically, getting out of the car with a metal baseball bat. Jonty got out of the car too and he also had a bat. As did the other two goons.
It was going to be baseball against hurley. The crossover game the world had been waiting for.
“Come on, then,” I said.
“What if he shoots us?” one of the henchpeople said.
“Don’t come on, then,” I said.
“Fuck it, I don’t see any gun,” Pete said, and leaped over my fence and swung the baseball bat at me. The bat was very heavy, and it was easy enough to step out of its arc and hit him on the back with the hurley stick.
“Baseball is a very fine game,” I said. “But if you’re not used to playing it, wielding a heavy bat can unbalance you.”
“You’re a Fenian bastard, so you are!” Pete said, and swung again.
This time, he almost bloody got me, so I had no choice but to whack him on the top of the head with the hurley. Hard.
He went down like a ton of bricks.
I went for Jonty. Yeah, I know, Gandhi, the Buddha, all that jazz, but I mean, who can resist beating up a Nazi?
He went to swing his bat, but it banged into the car and fell out of his hand. I picked it up. He looked at the hurley stick and looked at me.
“Run,” I said.
He took off down the street as fast as his legs would carry him.
One of the remaining henchpeople dropped his bat and took off after him. His mate, however, did not.
He was a big guy. Six-five, 225. Prison tats. Hard man. He looked as though he knew how to swing a baseball bat. Had been swinging baseball bats into kneecaps since he was fourteen.
He stepped away from the car to give himself some room.
“Sex Pistols fan, are you?” I asked him.
“Aye.”
“‘God Save the Queen’—is that what you were playing? You like that one?”
“It’s good.”
“You know what the key line is in that song?” I asked him as we began circling around each other in the middle of the street.
“What?”
“You’re probably thinking it’s ‘there’s no future for you.’ And certainly the Sex Pistols were no strangers to simple statements of nihilism. But I don’t think that’s it.”
“Come here so I can beat your brains out,” the big man said, and I circled, carefully, out of arm’s reach.
“Maybe you’re thinking it’s ‘God save the Queen: the fascist regime’? I don’t think so. John Lydon understood the difference between oligarchy and fascism even then. I think that was just in there for the rhyme and the fact that it scanned so beautifully. And don’t say ‘Is this the UDA, is this the IRA?’ That’s a different song completely; you’ll just be an idiot if you say that. No?—”
The big guy swung at me, missed, and reverse-swung and missed again but not by much.
“No, the key line is, ‘there is no future in England’s Dreaming.’ You know what the Dreaming is, right?”
“It’s something to do with Australians,” the big man said.
“That’s right. The Aboriginals are an old culture. They’re migratory. They follow what they call Dream Lines through a mythological landscape here on Earth. And what Lydon is saying in that song, I think, is that England has to recapture or reimagine its own mythological past so it can have a better future. Man can live in the desert, but he cannot live in a spiritual desert.”
“Very interesting,” the big skinhead said, and swung his bat vertically down toward my skull.
I dove out of the way and the bat swished through the air and hit the Volvo’s roof. The big man was getting too close for comfort. I set down my beloved hurley stick and took the Glock out of the back of my trousers.
I pointed it at him and he dropped the bat and put his hands up.
“I hope I’ve given you food for thought,” I said.
“Aye. You have.”
“Great. Now, get on your knees and put your hands behind your head.”
The big man did as he was bidden, and I kept the gun on him until the police showed up from the station.
A dozen peelers came because they must have gotten half a dozen phone calls from Coronation Road residents.
Among them was Rachel from next door, who was looking at me with some concern. Next to her was Mrs. Campbell, smoking a ciggie and enjoying the show.
One of the coppers was Lawson.
“Sir, when the alert came through and I heard the address, I came out here immediately. Are you okay?”
“Never better.”
“What was it? Some sort of assassination attempt?”
“Nothing so grand. Some local roughnecks who wanted to smash up my house in my absence. They’re lucky I was here. If Bobby Cameron had caught them doing something like that on his street without his permission, he’d have kneecapped the lot of them.”
I thought again of Sun Tzu. And Clausewitz. I could possibly have solved this without any violence at all. That would have been the pure form of the art of persuasion. But Duffy’s growth and progress was not a linear graph. Sometimes it dipped below the X axis.
“Well, since I’m out here, I should tell you that Superintendent Clare has offered me a chance to sit in on the interview with Brendan O’Roarke,” Lawson said.
“O’Roarke agreed to an interview?”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
I rubbed my chin. “He must be getting worried. All his confreres getting murdered like that.”
“Yes.”
“And Clare says you can sit in on it?”
“Yes.”
“He’s not coming north of the border, is he?”
“No, Dundalk Garda Station.”
“Well, that’s better than nothing.”
“I know you were supposed to go home tomorrow, sir, but?—”
“Yeah, okay. I’m in if you want me.”
“I do.”
“I’ll call the missus.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll have to change my ferry time, but I can stay one more day. It’ll be without pay, though. McArthur says he’s cutting me off, the bastard. Is, uhm, Sergeant McCrabban...”
“Yes, he says he wants to come.”
“Well, in that case I’ll definitely come.”
Lawson nodded and cleared his throat. “What do you want us to do with these two? Charge them with assault?”
“Nah, no charges, I think they learned their lesson. It was a friendly textual analysis of Sex Pistols lyrics that just got a bit out of hand, that’s all.”