‘I’ll follow the leads, Duffy. Now don’t tell me how to do my bloody job ever again,’ she says and hangs up.
I sit there, holding the phone.
Sometimes, Duffy, you have to have faith in the competence of others. You personally can’t fix everything.
I sigh and put the phone in its cradle.
Beemer. Seafront. Home.
Bacon frying in the back kitchen, Miles Davis on the record player, the cat snoozing in front of the turf fire.
I go into the kitchen and kiss Beth. The hair dye is all gone now and she is green-eyed and glowing and wild-haired and beautiful.
‘How was your day? Riot duty, yes?’
‘Today was the last day of it. And you won’t believe this, I got the car back. Totally unscathed. We won’t have to use the bloody loaner any more.’
‘That’s a shame, I quite liked that little Yugo.’
I put my arms about her. ‘How was your day?’
‘I can’t wait for this to be over,’ she said, patting her belly.
‘Soon, now. Do you like the name Lily?’
‘No!’
‘Do you like the name Emma?’
‘Emma? Hmmm. I’ll have to think about that … Oh, Sean, you couldn’t run up the lane and grab some wild raspberries? Craving them. Raspberries and cream.’
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘There are blackberries and blackcurrants up there, too.’
Beth gags. ‘No blackcurrants! Just raspberries!’
Outside into the grey remains of the day with a wicker basket. All the kids are in getting their dinner, so I’m alone on the street but for a dog sleeping in the middle of the road.
Right on Coronation Road and left up Victoria Road. Victoria Road to Victoria Lane and soon I’m up among the wild blackberry bushes, the crab apples and the hawthorn.
A breath of wind. A hint of brine. Autumn in the sheep and barley fields.
In a few weeks I’ll be wheeling my baby girl up here in her pushchair. I’ll show her this fox print in the mud if it’s still here. ‘Look, it’s a fox, Emma. An old vixen, more than likely.’
I grab a bunch of wild raspberries and throw them in the basket just as the sky opens and the rain resumes its longstanding war of attrition against Ireland. I run back down Victoria Lane towards those smoky blue turf fires of civilisation where thousands of other souls are huddled on this little green lifeboat of an island that’s still somehow floating in the turbulent waters of the Irish Sea.
‘I’m back!’ I yell, as I open the front door.
Beth is standing in the hall with her coat on and a bag packed. Her eyes are wide: excited, expectant, petrified.
‘Oh shit. Is it time?’
‘It’s time,’ she says.
AFTERWORD
This book is a work of fiction that explores some aspects of life in Northern Ireland in the 1980s that did not become public knowledge until several decades later. I have drawn on the findings of Giving Victims a Voice (2013), the report into the allegations made against the late Jimmy Savile. The report makes chilling reading, particularly in its analysis of police incompetence and complacency across a number of forces in the UK. Savile silenced some victims by alluding to his ‘friends in the police’, and others by stating that he was ‘on very good terms with gunmen in Northern Ireland’. This book is set in 1987, when Savile’s influence had not yet reached its zenith. In 1990 he was knighted at the personal request of Mrs Thatcher (her fourth attempt to do so) and in the same year, Pope John Paul II appointed Savile a Knight Commander of the Pontifical Equestrian Order of Saint Gregory the Great (KCSG). The investigation into the alleged Dolphin Square paedophile ring that was launched in the wake of Operation Yewtree is still ongoing.
This book also draws upon the much-criticised Report of the Inquiry into Children’s Homes and Hostels (1986) into the Kincora Boys’ Home scandal. In January 2013, the Belfast News Letter reported that files on the Kincora Boys’ Home were ‘conspicuously absent from the routine January 2013 release of 1982 government papers under the 30-year rule’. The documents relating to the alleged prostitution ring and MI5 cover-up at Kincora cannot now be released until 2033.
1987 was a typical year for the Troubles in Ulster. Twenty policemen were killed in the line of duty, which meant that the RUC – for the sixteenth consecutive year – was the police force with the highest mortality rate in the western world.
1987 also saw the beginning of the so-called ‘Tallaght Strategy’ in the Republic of Ireland that laid the foundations for the ‘Celtic Tiger’ boom. Ireland subsequently became a major centre for the manufacture of mobile phones and computers.
The strange military career of Harald Ek is – loosely – based on that of the Finnish officer Lauri Törni, who fought under three flags in four wars and was finally killed on a US Special Forces mission in Vietnam.
Muhammad Ali came to Ireland many times over the years. The two most famous trips were in 1972, to fight Alvin Lewis at Croke Park, and in 2005, to visit Ennis, County Clare, which was the ancestral home of his great-grandfather, Abe Grady. He did not, alas, make it to Belfast on either of those occasions but if he had I bet it would have gone down exactly the way I described it in Chapter 1.
ADRIAN MCKINTY’S SEAN DUFFY THRILLERS
THE COLD COLD GROUND
Book one in the Sean Duffy series
Adrian McKinty
‘If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written’ The Times
Two dead.
One left in a car by the side of a road. He was meant to be found quickly. His killer is making a statement.
The other is discovered hanging in a tree, deep in a forest. Surely a suicide: she’d just given birth, but there’s no sign of the baby.
Nothing seems to link the two, but Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy knows the links that seem to be invisible are just waiting to be uncovered. And as a policeman who has solved six murders so far in his career, but not yet brought a single case to court, Duffy is determined that this time, someone will pay.
‘Told with style, courage and dark as night wit’ Stuart Neville
‘An exciting new voice’ Ian Rankin
ISBN 978 1 84668 823 2
eISBN 978 1 84765 795 4
I HEAR THE SIRENS IN THE STREET
Book two in the Sean Duffy series
Adrian McKinty
‘The ever-excellent McKinty is on great form … characteristically fast and thrilling’ Mail on Sunday
1982. The year of a world cup, the Commodore 64 and the Falklands War. In Belfast, there’s just more rain and more Troubles.
After an injury in the line of duty, Sean Duffy’s back at work, ready for his first case: a torso in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. And a single clue. A tattoo: ‘No sacrifice too great’. Somewhere, there is a missing ‘t’.
Duffy knows there’s always a bloody trail leading from a body to its killer. And no matter how faint, he will find it. So from businessmen to beautiful widows, old police notes to ambassador’s records, country lanes to city streets, Duffy works every angle. And wherever he goes, he smells a rat …
‘One hell of a story. Sean Duffy is a great creation, and the place comes alive’ Daniel Woodrell
ISBN 978 1 84668 819 5
eISBN 978 1 84765 929 3
IN THE MORNING I’LL BE GONE
Book three in the Sean Duffy series
Adrian McKinty
‘Begins and ends spectacularly’ The Times
Sean Duffy’s got nothing. So when MI5 come knocking, Sean knows exactly what they want, and what he’ll want in return, but he hasn’t got the first idea how to get it.
Of course he’s heard about the spectacular escape of IRA man Dermot McCann from Her Majesty’s Maze prison. And he knew their paths would cross. But looking for Dermot leads Sean to an old locked-room mystery, and into the kind of danger where you can lose as easily as win.
From
old betrayals and ancient history to 1984’s most infamous crime, Sean tries not to fall behind in the race to annihilation. Can he outrun the most skilled terrorist the IRA ever created? And will the past catch him first?
‘Creeps up on you and explodes like a terrorist bomb … places McKinty firmly in the front rank of modern crime writers’ Daily Mail
ISBN 978 1 84668 821 8
eISBN 978 1 84765 931 6
GUN STREET GIRL
Book four in the Sean Duffy series
Adrian McKinty
‘Reminds me of Iain Banks’ jaded-but-idealistic narrator-heroes’ Guardian
Duffy’s back to blow a closed case wide open …
Belfast, 1985. Gunrunners on the borders, riots in the cities, The Power of Love on the radio. And somehow, hanging on, is Detective Inspector Sean Duffy.
The usual rounds of riot duty and sectarian murders are interrupted when a wealthy couple are shot dead while watching TV. Their son jumps to his death, leaving a note claiming responsibility. But something doesn’t add up, and people keep dying.
Soon Duffy is on the trail of a mystery that will pit him against shadowy US national security forces, and take him into the white-hot heart of the biggest political scandal of the decade.
WINNER OF THE 2014 NED KELLY AWARD
‘One of the great crime series … brilliant’ Sun
ISBN 978 1 84668 982 6
eISBN 978 1 78283 051 1
MORE FROM ADRIAN MCKINTY
DEAD I WELL MAY BE
Michael Forsythe #1
An illegal immigrant escaping the Troubles, young Michael Forsythe is strong, clever and fearless. In pre-Giuliani New York, drug wars, extortion and violence rule the city. Michael and his lads tumble through the streets, shaking down victims and fighting for turf, block by block. But Michael mistakes being the boss’s favourite for being untouchable, and it’s a grave error …
‘His prose is so hard, so tough, so New York-honest’ Frank McCourt
THE DEAD YARD
Michael Forsythe #2
It’s been five years since Michael Forsythe solved his problems in Harlem. Five years with a price on his head and not much to do with his days. Escaping to Spain, he is imprisoned on fabricated charges. Enter British intelligence agent Samantha Caudwell, who offers him a deal to infiltrate an IRA sleeper cell in New England. So he crosses, double-crosses and escapes his own lies by a hair’s breadth.
‘The Dead Yard is compelling crime fiction at its finest!’ Ed McBain
THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD
Michael Forsythe #3
Michael Forsythe might be, as one of his assailants puts it, ‘un-fucking-killable’, but that doesn’t seem to deter people from trying. He’s living in Lima, reasonably well-hidden by the FBI’s Witness Protection Program, but Bridget Callaghan, whose fiancé he murdered twelve years ago, has an enduring wish to see him dead. So when her two assassins pass him the phone to speak to her before they kill him, Michael thinks she just wants to relish the moment. In fact, out of desperation, she is giving him a chance to redeem himself. All he has to do is return to Ireland and find her missing daughter. Before midnight.
‘As dark and violent as any thriller fan could demand’ Irish Times
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