I told him that we were from Carrick RUC and were investigating the murders of Tommy Little and Andrew Young.
“The two fruits? That guy should get a medal, so he should,” he said with a hideous grin.
“Where were you on the night of Tuesday the twelfth?”
“I was in bed with my wife, so I was.”
“She’ll vouch for that?”
“She better.”
“Did you know either Tommy Little or Andrew Young?”
Seawright leaned back in his chair. “Your investigation must be in a sorry way if you’ve come to question me just because I’ve said a few things about the queers. I mean, excuse me, officer Duffy, but isn’t being queer still illegal in Northern Ireland?”
“Being homosexual isn’t, homosexual acts are, but there is an interesting case up before the European Court of Human Rights that—”
“Fucking Europe. The fucking whore of Babylon will bring about the apocalypse. Sixteen years, Sergeant Duffy, 1997. Not 2000, no. The fenians got the calendar wrong. 1997, that’s the Millennium. That’s when our Lord Jesus Christ will return and cleanse this world of the idolaters and fenians and queers and all the mockers of the holy Bible.”
“Any particular day I should keep clear?” I asked him.
“August twenty-ninth,” he said immediately. I was a little thrown by that and I glanced at Crabbie and he asked Seawright if any of his followers had been bragging about the murders. Seawright denied that they had.
Seawright’s secretary spoke through the intercom: “Councillor, I’m afraid you have another appointment.”
Crabbie gave me a “Why are we wasting our time here?” look.
I nodded and got to my feet.
“If any of your followers do feel the urge to hasten the work of the Millennium I hope you’ll dissuade them, Councillor Seawright. Murder is a crime too,” I said and left my card on his desk.
I picked up one of the Proof The Bible Is True pamphlets and walked out into the reception area. It would be an understatement to say that I was surprised to see Freddie Scavanni talking good-naturedly to Councillor Seawright’s secretary. He was wearing a tailored black silk suit with a black shirt and a black tie. Anywhere else you wouldn’t have given Freddie a second look but in Northern Ireland terms Scavanni was a bit of a dandy.
“Hello, Freddie,” I said cheerfully, “We were just coming to see you. Fancy you hanging out here. With Councillor Seawright of all people. That’s interesting isn’t it, Detective McCrabban?”
“Very interesting,” McCrabban agreed.
“What do you want see me about?” Scavanni asked, clearly irritated.
“We’ll wait for you upstairs and then we’ll talk,” I said, winked at him and we went up.
Freddie’s office was buzzing with earnest young men with beards and bell-bottomed corduroys. The women were in miniskirts and tight Aran sweaters and looked as if they’d bang you at the drop of a hat if you said you were on the run from the Johnnie Law.
I nodded at Scavanni’s secretary and waltzed into his office.
“Don’t worry, Freddie’s expecting us,” I said.
McCrabban lit his pipe and I read Proof The Bible Is True until Freddie came in fifteen minutes later.
“What can I do for you?” he asked, apparently in a better mood.
I passed him across the DUP pamphlet. “Fascinating stuff, Freddie. Your buddy Seawright down there thinks the fossils were placed under the ground by God to test our faith. Is that what you think?”
Freddie took the pamphlet and dropped it in the trash can.
“I don’t have time for games. As you can see, we are very busy at the moment.”
“What were you doing hanging with George Seawright? Aren’t you supposedly mortal enemies or something?”
“Don’t be naive, peeler.”
I nodded. Yeah. I had been naive. Freddie had something that Seawright didn’t. An aura, a charisma, an arrogance. He was relaxed. Too relaxed. Two detectives had come to see him about a murdered man and he didn’t even break a sweat. He was cool as a goddamned Irish summer.
When people like Freddie came into a room the gravity changed. You could feel it. Freddie had presence, like Billy Wright and Gerry Adams. Perhaps all players had it. Was that what Freddie was … a player?
I thought about it for a heartbeat or two.
“This job is largely a front isn’t it?” I suggested.
“What?”
“A front, a cover, a beard.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You work for the Force Research Unit too don’t you, Freddie?”
McCrabban looked at me in amazement.
“Never heard of them,” Freddie said.
“The FRU, the ‘nutting squad’, the IRA internal security unit.”
“I have no idea what you’re going on about,” he said with a shake of the head.
“Something’s been troubling me, Freddie. Tommy Little was the head of the Force Research Unit. He was coming over to see you the night he was murdered. If I’m an ordinary foot soldier and the head of the FRU is coming to see me I’d be shitting my pants. I’d be on a plane to fucking Indochina. But not you. Why is that, Freddie?”
“I called him. About cars. Remember?”
“The story about the homosexual serial killer didn’t break for two full days after Tommy went missing. That’s two days in which the IRA knows one fact and one fact only: Tommy Little, the head of their internal security branch, is on his way to see you. Why aren’t you dead, Freddie? Why didn’t they torture you and kill you?”
He sighed. “I’m assuming these are not rhetorical questions.”
They had been twenty minutes ago but they weren’t now. If you were setting up a press office why have Councillor Seawright from the DUP in the same building? Surely office space in Belfast wasn’t that precious, was it? Why share a building with Seawright? I suppose the real question was why not? What have you got to fear if you’re FRU? If you’re FRU everybody else better watch out, not you. You certainly don’t fear a punk like Seawright.
I smiled, leaned back in the chair and tried another bluff: “I know who you are, Freddie. You’re FRU too, aren’t you? More than that. You were Tommy Little’s deputy, you were the second in command of the FRU.”
“Brilliant!” he said and laughed.
“Why was Tommy coming to see you? It crossed my mind that you and Tommy were having an affair. You’re a good looking guy, but that can’t be it, can it? If you’re homosexual you wouldn’t still be in this job, would you? There’s a purge going on right now to distance the IRA from this nasty business.”
“You have quite the imagination, officer. You’re clearly wasted in the RUC.”
“And Tommy wasn’t coming over to brace you, was he? If he was coming over on orders from the IRA Army Council he would have brought an entire team, wouldn’t he? Nah, he was coming over to consult you about something. The reason you’re not dead, Freddie, is because you’re still a valued member of the team, aren’t you?”
“Maybe he’s the one who’s leading the investigation into Tommy Little’s death? Maybe he’s the one bracing other people?” Crabbie said, jumping on the bandwagon. I liked that and I grinned at him.
“All this, the new job, the new office with the DUP just one floor below. Seawright’s UVF isn’t he? Seawright’s UVF, Billy White is UDA and you’re the brand new head of FRU and the new liaison between the loyalist paramilitaries and the IRA,” I said.
Freddie folded his hands across his lap and chuckled. “That’s a very good story. You boys should turn pro.”
“You want to hear a story? How about this? You wanted Tommy’s job so you fucking topped him and then you went and shot some random gay guy that you knew about. And you did this because the IRA army are a conservative bunch and they’d buy any old shite about poofters killing each other or a lunatic running around killing homosexuals,” I said.
Freddie grinned at
me. He looked at McCrabban. “You must have a great time keeping up with him, I’ll bet you lads don’t even need TV down the station.”
“Do you like opera, Freddie?”
“Some.”
“Do you play an instrument?” I asked.
“A piano,” Scavanni said with an open easy grin. “Where the hell are you going with any of this?”
“What about Greek? Do you know Greek, Freddie?” I asked quietly.
“Ancient Greek?”
“Yes.”
“I studied it in school.”
“You know the story of Ariadne?”
“The Minotaur, of course.”
He didn’t deny it. He didn’t hum and ha. He just sat there, amused by me. Fifteen seconds went past. His grin widened a little.
I began to think that I was the one lost in the labyrinth.
I closed my eyes and tried to think.
The secretary said: “Mr Scavanni, the calls are stacked up, if you’re through here …”
“Gentlemen please, I’m really jam-packed today,” Freddie said.
I opened my eyes, got to my feet. “Let’s go, Crabbie,” I said and, turning to Scavanni, I added, “You and I will be talking again.”
“The next time you try and barge in here you better have a warrant, Sergeant Duffy. Some of us have work to do.”
I nodded, but did not reply.
We went outside and walked back to Queen’s Street police station.
In the cop shop we ate sandwiches and I found their local Special Branch rep and asked him if there was any intel at all on Freddie Scavanni. He pulled the folders. Freddie had a file, of course, but he’d been out of the game for at least six or seven years and had restricted his activity purely to the political side.
“Not a player?”
“Not a player.”
In the Land Rover back to Carrick Crabbie put on Downtown Radio and we listened to Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton. When we got through the roadblocks and army checkpoints McCrabban turned to me in the passenger’s seat.
“I’m surprised you’re not seasick, Sean,” he said.
“Oh, aye? Why’s that?”
“After that fishing expedition.”
“You’re funny.”
“No, that was really something.”
“You don’t think Scavanni’s holding out on us?”
“He’s definitely holding out on us. But even if he is FRU it means what exactly? We’re looking for Tommy Little’s killer and if Freddie Scavanni was that man, he’d be dead by now, wouldn’t he?”
“You may have a point.”
“You want me to drive us home?”
I shook my head. “Let’s take this old trawler to Rathcoole and see if we can piss off Billy White and his dashing young assistant Shane the same way we pissed off Freddie.”
North Belfast. The Shore Road. The M5 motorway. Rathcoole Estate. All the previous beats: Drizzle, tower blocks, terraces, murals of masked gunmen proudly displaying that icon of the second half of the twentieth century: the AK-47.
Stray dogs. Stray cats. No women. No cars. Rain and oil separating into strange colours and patterns by a process of organic chromatography.
The snooker hall. The back room.
The boxes of ciggies and UDA posters. Billy pouring over a ledger filled with accounts. Shane reading a comic book.
“You again?” Billy said, looking vaguely disappointed.
“What? You thought you’d bought me off with two cartons of cigarettes?”
“I thought you weren’t going to bother me since I was so nice as to answer all your questions.”
Shane was looking at me over the top of the comic.
Batman.
Do you have a secret identity, Shane my lad? What do you get up to after dark?
“Are you a married man, Billy?” I asked conversationally.
“Aye, two kids.”
“Boys? Girls?”
“One of each, Caitlin, two, Ian, four. You want to see pictures?”
“Love to,” I said.
We saw the pictures. They’d been taken on a pilgrimage to the site of the Battle of the Boyne in County Meath.
“Charming,” I said.
“Lovely,” Crabbie added.
“So,” I said.
“Tommy Little.”
“Jesus! Not this again, peeler.”
“Aye, this again. And again and again until we are satisfied,” Crabbie said, not liking Billy’s tone one little bit.
I looked at McCrabban. You run it, mate.
“What time did Tommy come by here last Tuesday?” he asked.
“About eight,” Billy said with a sigh.
“Why did he come here?”
Billy looked at Crabbie and then he raised his eyebrows at me. “You can mention the heroin to my colleague,” I said. “We’re not interested in that.”
Billy sighed. “Tommy gave us a couple bags of dope, we chatted about one or two things and then he left. That’s it,” Billy said.
“What things did you chat about?” McCrabban asked.
Billy shrugged. “He was reassuring us that despite the craziness around the hunger strikes all of our bilateral deals would be intact. He said that there would be a lot of rhetoric from Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness but underneath it all we would keep to our arrangements regarding territory, rackets and narcotics. It was standard stuff but it was still good to hear.”
“The conversation would have taken how long? Ten minutes? In which case he left at ten past eight? Eight fifteen?”
“I don’t know, but no later than eight twenty.”
“He got in his car and drove straight away?”
Neither man spoke.
McCrabban and I exchanged a look.
“Well?” McCrabban insisted.
“He didn’t exactly do that,” Billy said.
I felt a little burst of electricity along my spine.
“Go on,” I said.
“It wasn’t a big deal,” Shane said.
The Sphinx speaks. Excellent.
“What wasn’t a big deal?” I asked.
“He said he was going to Straid to see someone.”
Freddie Scavanni.
“And?”
“Well, it was lashing and I asked him if he could give me a lift,” Shane said. “I live in a flat out on the Straid Road.”
“You’ve a car though, don’t you, Shane?”
“It was banjaxed.”
Convenient.
“So what happened next, Shane?” I asked.
Shane bit his lower lip and shook his head. “Fuck. This is why I didn’t even want to mention it. Nothing happened. He gave me a lift. He was in a big hurry. I was at the house five minutes later and then he went on his way.”
“This would have been eight thirty?”
“Yeah.”
“He gave you a lift and then he drove off?”
“That’s it. Like I say, he was really pressed for time.”
I let silence sink into the room for thirty seconds or so.
Silence is also a form of conversation.
Billy spoke through his hard man look, Shane through his gaze which never left the floor.
“Why didn’t you lads tell me all this the other day?” I asked.
“There was no point complicating things. If we’d told you, you’d have thought we had something to do with it. And we had nothing to do with it. We wouldn’t be that buck daft,” Billy said.
“And why are you telling us now?” Crabbie asked.
“Shane and I were talking and we wondered what would happen if you found Tommy’s car with Shane’s fingerprints in it,” Billy said. “You might get the wrong idea.”
“Or the right idea,” I said.
Crabbie didn’t know what I knew about Shane. And I wondered for a moment how exactly I could tell him.
“Are you sure Tommy didn’t meet with some kind of unfortunate accident when he was here?” Crabbie asked.
&
nbsp; Bobby shook his head. “Come on, peeler. Why would we do that? There’s no angle in it for us.”
“Maybe Detective Constable McCrabban’s on the right lines. Maybe it was an accident. Maybe you were showing Tommy your brand new Glock 9mm when … boom!”
“Wise the bap!” Billy muttered.
I looked at McCrabban. He shrugged. I stood up. “Are the pair of you going to be here for a while? We might have more questions,” I said.
“We’ll be here,” Billy said.
We went back outside to the Land Rover. While we’d been talking some wee shite had graffitied “SS RUC” on the rear door.
“Oh my God,” I said. “If Brennan sees this!”
Crabbie put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t have an eggy fit, Sean. We’ll drive past a garage, get some white spirit and clean it off before we get back to Carrick.”
“Wee fucking shites!” I yelled at the estate and my voice echoed off all the concrete at right angles.
I checked underneath for a mercury tilt bomb and we climbed in and I called up Matty on the radio. They took forever to get him because he was on the bog.
“Yes?” he said.
“Give me the addresses of Billy White and Shane McAtamney and make it sharpish,” I said.
He took his sweet time about it. “18 Queens Parade, Rathcoole and, uhm, number 4, 134 Straid Road, Whiteabbey. Oh, and I’ve got a bit of news,” he said at last.
“What news?”
“Your man, Seawright. Back in his Glasgow days, him and a bunch of welders allegedly beat up a couple of transvestite hookers. Beat them near to death,” Matty said.
“Cheers, Matt,” I said.
I looked at Crabbie. “What was that you were saying about fishing expeditions?” I added.
“Back to Belfast, talk it over with Seawright?” McCrabban wondered.
I shook my head. “Nah, I don’t really see it, mate. He’s hardly going to go on the BBC calling for death to the queers if he’s actually out killing queers.”
“What was it your man on the telly says: the only two things that are infinite are the universe and human stupidity.”
“It’s a fair point.”
“Oi, lads, I’m not done yet!” Matty said over the radio.
“There’s more?” I asked.
“There’s more.”
“Go on then.”
The Cold Cold Ground Page 20
