“I’m just going to step outside,” I said.
I went through the games room, opened the front door and took a breath of God’s free fresh air. It was raining now and all the men in denim were inside waiting their turn at the snooker tables.
A black Mercedes Benz 450 SL pulled up. It was your classic hood auto beloved of terrorists, pimps and African dictators.
Two men got out.
One of them got a drum of petrol from the boot and began rolling it round the back of the club. He was a young guy, blond hair, about twenty-two. Good-looking imp wearing brown slacks and a plain black T-shirt.
The other guy lit a cigarette and nodded at me. I knew that this was Billy. His hair was mostly black but with a Sontagian grey mohawk up front. His bluey-green eyes were sunk deep in his head and the lines around his mouth were deeper still. He had a square Celtic face, which reminded me a bit of Fred Flintstone or Ian McKellen.
“Are you the peeler who’s been ringing up looking for me?” he asked.
“Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy from Carrick RUC,” I replied.
“Is that a Catholic name?”
“Yes.”
He laughed a nasty wee laugh. “Ok, so what’s this all about?”
“Tommy Little.”
“Let me guess, you interviewed Walter Hays and he said that Tommy was coming over to see me? Is that right?” he said with animal cunning.
“That’s right.”
“You want to know how I know that?”
“You have telepathic abilities?”
“Because the IRA has already been on the phone to me, asking me when I saw Tommy last. Very polite they were too.”
Of course the IRA and the UVF were sworn enemies who in theory tried to kill each other at every opportunity. In practice, however, there were many contacts between the two organizations. They cooperated to reduce friction between the two communities and to facilitate the distribution and the collection of protection money.
“When did you see Tommy last?”
“Tommy came over here about eight o’clock the night he was topped. The Tuesday.”
“Why?”
“We had business to iron out.”
“What business?”
“It’s not relevant, copper,” Billy said with menace.
Like with Gerry Adams and Freddie Scavanni I knew where the power lay here. It was all with him. I had to go softly softly: he could terminate this interview any time he wanted and I’d never get another chance to talk to him again.
“Was it about drugs?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“I’m homicide, not a narc,” I said.
“Off the record then?”
“Off the record.”
“Swear it on the fucking Pope’s life.”
“I swear on the Pope’s life.”
“All right. Well, I can tell you’re dying to know so I’ll put you out of your misery. Some very bad lads had killed an enterprising young man up in Andy town who we had given a safe conduct to; and I was a bit concerned about this and I was also wondering what had happened to the three bags of brown tar heroin that this young man had been carrying.”
My mind was racing. Brown tar heroin? A safe conduct? What had Tommy Little to do with all of this?
“And what did Tommy say to that?” I said placidly.
“He didn’t say much of anything. We went into my office and he gave me two of the three bags and asked me if I was happy with that and I said that I was.”
“What time was this at exactly?”
“Like, I say, about eight.”
“How long did your meeting last?”
“Two minutes.”
“And then he was gone?”
“And then he was gone.”
“And you never saw him again?”
Billy shook his head but didn’t speak.
“You never saw Tommy again?”
“No.”
Billy was dressed in a red tracksuit, with Adidas sneakers and a golden chain around his neck. He had a spiderweb tattoo on one side of his neck and a red hand of Ulster on the other. It was very much the look of your middle echelon Protestant paramilitary, and yet there was something about it that didn’t quite fit.
This was the external. This was the image he was projecting. But there was more going on underneath. Billy was clever and his accent wasn’t Rathcoole at all. There was more than a hint of Southern Africa still.
“You were a copper too for a bit, weren’t you, Billy? In Rhodesia?”
“Copper? Is that what your file says? Give us some credit. We were practically running that country. Only thing holding it together. Those were days. High times! That place could have been paradise. Look at it now! We should have killed Mugabe when we had the chance and we did have the chance, believe me.”
I could imagine some of those high times: prison beatings, raids into Mozambique, torching villages, burning crops …
“How many people did you kill in Rhodesia, Billy?”
“More than enough, copper. More than enough,” he said chillingly.
I rubbed my chin. Was any of this relevant? He was a stone-cold killer but I knew that already. “You ever hear of a wee girl called Lucy Moore?”
“Who?”
“Do you know who Orpheus is?”
“What?”
“Are you a music lover, Billy?”
“Of course.”
“Do you like the opera?”
“The what?”
“Opera. Wagner. Puccini.”
“No fear.”
“Not your line?”
“Not my line.”
We looked at one another while Billy lit himself a cigarette. He offered me one and I took it. A plane was landing at the Belfast Harbour Airport and I watched it stick rigidly to its landing vector along the shore of Belfast Lough.
“Let me get this straight. Tommy Little came over to see you on Tuesday night at about eight o’clock. He was defusing a potentially serious dispute about who owned the heroin of a dead drug dealer. He stayed here for five minutes and then he left and you never saw him again.”
“That’s about right,” Billy said and again there was that look in his eyes that I didn’t quite like. If this was the truth it was not the whole truth.
“What did you do after Tommy left?”
“I played snooker until about twelve and then I went on home.”
“Witnesses?”
“Everybody in the club.”
“They’d swear on oath that you were the Shah of Iran.”
“That they would,” Billy laughed.
“How do you feel about queers, Billy?”
“Me personally?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t give a fuck. Who cares what people get up to in their own bloody home.”
“Very enlightened. What would you do if you found out one of your boys was a queer?”
“You know what we’d do.”
“You’d kill him?”
“We’d have to. The higher-ups would demand it.”
The drizzle turned to rain.
“Are there any more questions?” Billy asked.
“One or two,” I said.
“Then we better go inside.”
We went to the stuffy back room. Billy turned off the TV and kicked out his grandfather. He sat behind the desk.
“Shane, get in here!” he called and his young, blond-haired assistant came in. Shane sat down next to Billy, facing us. He was winsome and pretty and annoying and perhaps there was even a shade of Jupiter and Gannymede. Perhaps.
“You are?” I asked Shane.
“Shane Davidson. Davidson with a D.”
“Sergeant Duffy wants to know if Tuesday night was the last we ever saw of Tommy Little?” Billy said.
Shane’s eyes narrowed. “Of course it is,” Shane said, looking at Billy with a glance I could not interpret. Matty saw it too and gave me the minutest nod.
“Holy shit
, lads! You didn’t have a falling out with Tommy and fucking shoot him, did you?”
“Don’t you read the papers, mate? Tommy was killed by some nutcase doing in queers. Although I say nutcase, but the truth is, I’ll bet you most people think he’s doing everybody a favour,” Billy said.
“And besides, we know better than to fuck with Tommy Little!” Shane said.
“Aye, we do. The Great White Chiefs would kill us before the IRA ever did,” Billy added.
“What exactly did Tommy do for the IRA? What was his position?” I asked
Billy laughed and slapped his hand on the table. “Yon boy’s been dead four days and you don’t even know who he was? Christ, are you the Keystone Cops or what?”
“What was Tommy Little’s job for the IRA?” I insisted.
“You really don’t know?” Shane said again, sending his boss into hysterics.
“No.”
“Tommy Little was the head of the FRU,” Billy said.
“Tommy Little was the head of the IRA’s Force Research Unit?” I said incredulously.
“That he was.”
“That’s an Army Council position,” Matty gasped.
“So, you can see why anybody who killed Tommy would have to be a nutcase, wouldn’t you?” Billy said.
Yeah I could.
All the other angles had collapsed.
Tommy Little was the head of the FRU – the IRA’s internal security unit. The FRU was responsible for uncovering police informers and MI5 moles within the organization. They were the most feared group of men on the island of Ireland. Scarier than any of the paramilitaries, Special Branch or the SAS.
When the IRA got you, they’d kneecap you or shoot you in the head. When the FRU got you and they suspected that you were a police informer or a double agent the fun could last for a week. Torture with arc-welding gear, with hammers, drills, acid, electric shocks. Castration. Blinding. Dismemberment. These were the methods the FRU used to get at the truth.
No one but a lunatic would ever fuck with the FRU’s big cheese.
The blow back would be swift and terrible.
You’d have to be crazy.
I got to my feet. Matty stood next to me.
“Here, gents, take your poison,” Billy said offering us half a dozen cartons of cigarettes each.
I shook my head.
“Go on, lads, they’ve called a dock strike. Ciggies are all gonna be out of the shops by morning,” Billy said.
“Fuck it,” I said in a daze and took a carton of Marlboro. Matty took one of Benson and Hedges and we got a case of Virginia pipe tobacco for McCrabban. We walked out of the office into the wet battleship-grey Rathcoole afternoon. “Back in the Rover?” Matty asked.
“Let’s walk for a bit, clear our heads.”
We walked among the drab tenements and crumbling 1960s tower blocks. Everything was achromatic and in ruins less than twenty years after it had gone up. A massive social engineering experiment gone horribly wrong. “Where do you think the women are, Matty?” I asked. “It’s all men, here. No women, no kids.”
“Inside washing the clothes, hitting the weans, cooking the chips.”
I stopped at a twenty-foot-tall graffito: Look Out, Look Out, The Rathcoole KAI’s About. “What does KAI stand for?”
“Kill All Irish.”
“Kill All Irish. Nice. Rathcoole is from the Irish Rath Cuile meaning ‘in the centre of the ring fort’. Once this was a royal palace for the kings of the Ulaidh. Now look at it. Concrete towers and row upon row of soulless terraces.”
“If it was a palace these scumbags would still have messed it up, believe me,” Matty said.
I looked at my watch. It was four o’clock. Where had the day gone? “We should go home,” Matty said. “If Tommy Little was Force Research Unit, The Angel of Death wouldn’t go near him with a ten-foot pole. This is obviously the wrong angle. These boys are not that stupid.”
“Aye, I know. All right. All right, we’ll get back in the Rover. We’ll head off, but I want you to drop me round the corner away from the prying eyes in the tower blocks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I am going to go round the back of those derelict tenements and I’m going to sneak into one of them and wait for our boy to come out.”
“Billy?”
“I’m going to wait for Billy’s wee friend, Shane. I think he knows something he’s not saying.”
“Everybody in Belfast knows something they’re not saying.”
We got in the Land Rover. Matty drove me to a doomed basketball court that was now a rubbish dump filled with skips, shopping trolleys, prams and the odd burnt-out, hijacked car. I got out of the passenger side and put my gun in my raincoat pocket. “You be careful, Sean, ok?” Matty said.
“Careful is my middle name. That and Aloysius but you don’t need to tell anybody that.”
He smiled and I walked through the swirling circles of garbage to the abandoned terrace.
13: HE KISSED ME AND IT FELT LIKE A HIT
I waited in a gutted living room among the rats and human excrement, drug paraphernalia and dead pigeons. Outside the rain was pouring so hard it was as if hate rather than gravity was sucking it down to Rathcoole.
I had a perfect view of the snooker hall and the sad little strip mall. Only the bookie was doing any business but that wasn’t surprising with the Derby coming up and the beautiful bay stallion Shergar, even at 1-6, a horse to bet your pension on.
Evening.
The scene at the snooker hall began to wind down and Billy drove off in his Merc at seven on the zero zero. Shane came out at 7.01 with a leather jacket over his head in lieu of a raincoat. I turned up the collar on my mac and followed him at a discreet distance, into the estate, along the Doagh Road, through Abbots Cross (the very place where Bobby Sands had been born) past Whiteabbey Hospital and down the Station Road.
He stopped at the station bar for a drink. I followed him inside and got a whiskey against the cold. The local news was on. The murder of Tommy Little and Andrew Young was now the sixth lead. No one was interested. I wondered if that would piss off our killer. Perhaps he’d go bigger or perhaps he’d take his game over the water where it would play better. The story ran for less than a minute and that included another incendiary remark from Councillor George Seawright who said that homo-sexuals should be shipped to an island in the Atlantic and left to starve to death.
Shane finished his drink, bought a book of matches and left by the side door.
I waited ten beats and went out after him.
Several times Shane looked back to see if he was being tailed, but he never checked the far side of the street, two hundred yards behind. There were many ways to shake a tail and he knew none of them. “Who do you think’s after you, Shane, my lad? Or is just the dark you’re afeared of?”
He turned left on the Shore Road and walked a good quarter of a mile to Loughshore Park, a pleasant little bit of greenery right on the water. We were nearly at the University of Ulster now but instead of doing the obvious and turning up the Jordanstown Road or going straight on, he cut across the busy Shore Road and went to the public toilets at the park.
I waited for him to come back out.
He didn’t come back out.
The wind was whipping up the boats in the lough and forcing spray onto the highway. It was freezing and the rain was running down the back of my neck.
I saw that there was an exit to the toilets on the park side so I crossed over the Shore Road and waited under the branches of a small confederacy of white oak trees.
At least with the rain there will be no rioting tonight, I said to myself. And I’ll bet that the power workers’ wives forced their hubbies to keep the light and heat on too. The minutes ticked past. This is why peelers need a book. A wee paperback to stick in your pocket.
I stood there for a good fifteen minutes. “Has he fallen down the bloody hole?” I muttered. And then I began to have a darker suspicion.
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We were on the trail of a killer after all …
I took the service revolver out of my raincoat pocket and checked there were six .38 rounds in the cylinder. I stepped out from under the branches and began walking towards the bogs.
I got half way there and saw someone leave the toilets from the Shore Road side and walk briskly to a parked car I hadn’t noticed before. A Volkswagen Beetle. I began to run, but he began running too to get out of the rain.
He got in the Beetle and it drove off in the direction of the M5 motorway and the sliproads for Belfast.
“Jesus! You bloody blew it, Duffy!” I cursed myself. You wanted to be dry so you stood under the trees rather than a place where you would be equidistant between both exits. “You bloody idiot!” I said to the rain and the crashing surf.
Didn’t even get a licence plate, although if it was Shane and Shane’s car it would be easy enough to check.
“All right, all right, let’s see what you were doing in the bog for the last twenty five minutes,” I said, keeping my gun ahead of me as I went inside.
For some reason I’d been expecting a junkie but of course it was a fruit instead.
He was about nineteen or twenty, blue eyes, pale skin, black hair in a sort of Elvis quiff. High cheekbones and his fingernails were lacquered red. He was far too attractive not to be a poofter and he was wearing a leather jacket, jeans and converse high tops – standard rentboy garb.
He looked at the .38 and I put it away.
“Ahh, you’re a policeman,” he said nonchalantly.
“Well, I ain’t your fairy godmother.”
He took a step towards me. “Look at you, coming on so tough,” he said.
“Aren’t you the brave lad? What’s your name, son?”
“John Smith. You can call me Johnnie.”
He didn’t seem at all concerned that I could possibly shoot him or kneecap him. This toilet must be a well-known queer hang-out. I checked the graffiti on the wall: the usual Fuck The Pope, Remember 1690, UVF, UDA, UFF, but not as much of it as you would expect so close to Rathcoole.
“Who was that that was just in here?” I asked.
“His name?”
“Aye, his name.”
“I’ve seen him around, peeler, but I don’t know his name. Not really my type.”
The Cold Cold Ground Page 18
