by Chris Petit
He motioned Baker to pick up Sheehan and hold him. Candlestick punched him hard, once to the head and then in the gut, making him yelp and squeak.
‘Have mercy on an innocent man,’ Sheehan pleaded, his arms outstretched.
‘Be a man and I’ll let you live,’ whispered Candlestick.
The other man’s eyes flickered with hope. Candlestick made a point of two fingers and drove it into Sheehan’s solar plexus, doubling him up.
‘Ah, the dirty fucker’s been sick,’ said Baker.
Baker rubbed Sheehan’s face in his own vomit. That got a simple laugh from the crowd. Candlestick paused and looked at the puddled faces of the onlookers, slack with stupefaction. He felt the room in his control. The audience, after its initial awkwardness, now seemed in boozy good humour.
‘Tell us what you know about the Irish Republican Army,’ he asked Sheehan.
That got a gasp from the crowd. Candlestick’s claim that Sheehan had information on the IRA was barely an excuse to give the digging some point. But for the audience it was as though the whimpering victim had been transformed from a helpless drunk into a monster.
It became an epidemic during that summer of 1972. The killings were known as romperings after an Ulster TV children’s programme. Candlestick never knew who was responsible for the name. He knew of similar sessions in other parts of the city and wondered if Bunty was behind them. The fanatical McKeague, who was in the process of forming the Red Hand Commando, was attributed in some quarters with initiating them.
After Sheehan, Candlestick had difficulty remembering if the idea had been his or whether it had been planted in him so subtly by the likes of Bunty that he and others like McKeague claimed it as their own.
Invariably the men seized had no terrorist connections. They were just innocent drunks abducted as they stumbled home. But in Candlestick’s increasingly expert hands they confessed anyway.
How much was followed up afterwards he had no idea. The loyalists were unsystematic at best. The point of the sessions was not the information extracted, it was the sense of secret power gained, the feeling of invincibility, of striking at the enemy regardless of the victims’ actual innocence, a fact everyone was happy to ignore. But this sense of power soon collapsed into guilt, which was why it became necessary to continue. For Candlestick, who felt no guilt, the ritualized violence became the headiest of drugs.
Among his disciples was the young UVF thug Lenny, who prided himself on being able to hit harder than the rest. Candlestick gave him his head, making him the focus of these sessions. Lenny liked to cut. He also added a final twist, leaving his grisly signature by hacking at the victim’s throat until head and body were virtually severed.
All was condoned by Captain Bunty.
‘They’ve got to learn to stand on their own two feet and fight for themselves,’ he said of the loyalists.
They killed a young Catholic who was with Protestant friends at a disco at a hotel that was a meeting place for UDA leaders. Somebody recognized him as a Catholic and after a scuffle outside the hotel, in which Baker punched a woman in the eye, the young man was taken to Eddoes’ house and then on to a club where his jacket and boots were taken away. Nine men interrogated him about belonging to the Provisional IRA. He denied it, saying that he was out celebrating a wedding that was to take place the next day.
‘Not yours?’ asked Candlestick.
‘No, not mine.’
‘Pity. If you’d said yes I’d have let you go.’
By that stage they had loud music playing to mask the screams, a device that Lenny said gave a certain swing to the evening.
‘Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste,’ went the opening line of the song Candlestick played most, timing the victim’s screams to coincide with the song’s chorus of whoo-whoo-whoo!
Candlestick made the young man confess his guilt, like the others, forcing him to name his non-existent comrades. Meanwhile Baker repeatedly hit him on the back with a wooden pickshaft handle until it broke.
Candlestick, fired by the music and exulting in the sharp clarity of it all, produced a commando knife and crucified the lad to the wall, stabbing his palm with the dagger and using another knife on the other hand. Someone suggested cutting the balls off him, but Baker cut his buttock instead, opening up a long shallow incision. Candlestick then tore him free of the wall and picked him up single-handed and swung him round, dropping him on the floor on his head.
He saw the eyes of the other men high on the violence. He looked at the young man, broken on the floor, and felt a surge of tenderness. They always talked, always told him their stories, never mind that they made them up in the end, told him lies just to satisfy him, made a ghastly truth of their lies. He wondered where it came from, this desire to extract people’s stories from them. He wanted to know everything. He wanted no secrets between them. Before he had done he would cut him, once up and once across his lily-white chest, leaving the signature of his cross.
20
WHATEVER Warren had been typing wasnolongerin the flat. Cross searched all the obvious places and some less likely ones too. He was surprised by a drawerful of lingerie in the bedroom, all new and still in cellophane wrappers.
The start of Sunday church bells distracted him and he went to the window. A steady procession of people, dressed in their best, made their way past. The peal of the bells always depressed him. Sundays in Belfast struck him as being more than usually governed by the dead hand of the past.
He had meant to go on from the flat to Deidre’s parents, but instead arranged to meet Warren’s colleagues. He had only phoned the newspaper on the off-chance someone might answer, then realized from the noise in the background that the office was full of staff preparing the Monday edition. When he called the O’Neills and spoke to Deidre, saying that he might come later, she managed as always to sound both disapproving and relieved.
At the newspaper offices Cross asked for the duty editor and was told he was not available, so had to make do with the author of Warren’s obituary, a smug young man who was pointed out to him sitting in the middle of a large open-plan office.
‘Ronnie Stevens,’ he said as they shook hands. ‘I know, I don’t look like a Ronnie.’
He was only in his mid-twenties but came with an air of experience, probably because he felt that seeing a dead body or two entitled him to. Horn-rimmed glasses contributed to a spurious gravity. His checked shirt Cross recognized as Marks & Spencer because he had one like it, a Christmas present from the children.
The bizarre circumstances of Warren’s death were not being reported, apart from a brief note on page one. The obituary, which Stevens showed him in proof, made only passing reference to Warren’s decline, put down to illness. The photograph was of a younger, thinner Warren, hair neatly combed and fresh faced, more or less how Cross remembered him.
‘It could have happened to any of us, poor sod,’ said Stevens. ‘Newspapers, you know. Us hacks like a drink, but you learn to control it. Work hard, play hard.’
Cross asked if Warren had been popular.
‘Not unpopular.’
Cross took this to mean that he had not been liked, a suspicion confirmed by Stevens’ emerging description of Warren as a gauche figure, tagging along and drinking with the crowd.
‘What about his wife?’
Stevens wiped his face with his hand, suppressing a smirk. ‘We were all dead surprised when he showed up with her. Good old Niall, not exactly a ladies’ man, and she was a looker. Made him glow like a Belisha beacon. Bloody hell, we thought, how did he pull that off?’
‘And how did he?’
Stevens shrugged. ‘Well, it’s not who he was, it’s being here – in the front line, all that crap.’
‘But she must have been able to take her pick.’
‘Yeah, sure. You see them in the Europa, war-zone groupies hanging around with the big-shot foreign correspondents, getting shit faced. But I don’t think she d
rank, really, and that’s all most of those boys do. Niall didn’t in those days and whatever he lacked in social graces he made up for in contacts. Niall knew the stuff that doesn’t get in the papers. That goes a long way with some women – they feel they’re getting the dirt. Anyway, she looked like she’d signed on for the full ghoul’s tour. There was even a rumour that she was intelligence.’
Cross raised his eyebrows.
Stevens dismissed the suggestion with a shrug. ‘They say that about anyone who turns up here without a good reason.’
‘Hadn’t they only been married a few months?’
Stevens scratched his neck and said he’d never fathomed the marriage. ‘She never struck me as the marrying type. I think it was a joke for her. As far as I know they never lived together.’
Cross let the silence ride, curious. Stevens looked reflective for the first time, even slightly out of his depth.
‘Then,’ Stevens went on, ‘given the circumstances of his death, I suppose she must have found out about his sexual quirks.’
‘And what do you make of his quirks?’
Stevens gave a worldly shrug that didn’t quite come off. ‘It was news to me. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose.’
‘What story was he working on when he died?’
‘Story? I doubt if there was one. He hadn’t written a word in months and had more or less given up coming in by the end.’
‘What happened to his wife?’
‘Haven’t the foggiest.’
‘In spite of her being so intriguing.’
‘Outside work we don’t have much of a social life apart from the pub and once she dropped out we lost sight of her.’
Cross asked to be shown where Warren worked and Stevens led him to a space identical to all the rest, with a cheap modern desk surrounded by a low partition stuck with various memos about pay negotiations. Warren’s filing cabinet was empty, apart from a few hanging folders with more staff memos, several dozen back issues of the newspaper and a two-year-old Playboy magazine stuffed behind. The desk revealed the usual clutter and in the drawers were several bulky cardboard folders full of old drafts of stories, scrappily typed and amended in biro. Muddled in with them were dozens of pages of scrawled notes torn from notepads.
A thinner folder marked ‘Current’ contained only a few incoherent and unfinished notes. Apparently Warren’s recent work amounted only to these few pieces of paper. None of it was of interest apart from a striking quotation which read: ‘When the Nazis took on the government of Poland they flooded the Polish bookstalls with pornography. The theory was that if you permit all things for self-gratification, you are likely to encourage withdrawal from any sort of corporate responsibility. ’
The quote was circled and arrowed towards a list written in the same hand, under the heading Drugs: Provs? UDA? INLA? INLA-UDA? Underneath was an amendment: Don’t be daft.
Cross wondered if the connection had anything to do with Warren’s story. He pocketed it and went off in search of Warren’s editor.
Brian McCausland was a corpulent man with a Zapata moustache, a hangover from two decades earlier that looked like a forlorn reminder of his years on the street, before he got soft sitting at a desk. A well-rounded gut pointed to days organized around expense-account lunches.
He took Cross into a private office with an inside window that looked out on to the central working area and another with a view of the Royal Avenue. After expressing perfunctory regret about his colleague’s death, he moved on to the story Warren had been working on when he died.
‘I’ve no idea what it was about,’ said McCausland. ‘He didn’t say and I didn’t push it.’
‘Don’t you usually discuss stories with your reporters?’
‘Of course I do. Frankly, Inspector, I thought it was probably a fantasy. No doubt you’ve heard the shape Niall was in when he died.’
‘Where would this story be now, if it wasn’t fantasy?’
‘In his head, I would imagine, if anywhere.’
‘Did he not tell you anything about the story?’
McCausland blew out his cheeks and shook his head, to indicate the futility of Cross’s line of enquiry. ‘Niall was in a hell of a state by the end, drunk all the time. He was on a formal warning and within an inch of being fired, and he said he had a story that was, well, big, and would I back him. As he wouldn’t say what the story was about, it was rather difficult to offer any assurance. But I gave him until today – no, tomorrow – to come back with a full brief.’
‘Could it have been about this?’
He showed him Warren’s note about the pornography. McCausland read it, frowning.
‘If it was, he was barking up the wrong tree. Armed robbery, hijacking drinks lorries, extortion, drinking clubs, alternative transport systems, tax fraud and prostitution, yes. We know the terrorists go in for all of them. But drugs and pornography, no. The Provos take a very hard line on drugs, but you know that. Niall was not reliable towards the end.’
‘How did he seem in the last few weeks?’
McCausland considered the question, sucking his teeth. The gesture reminded Cross of Ronnie Stevens scratching his neck and he wondered if either was hiding something.
‘Scared,’ said McCausland finally.
‘Why?’
‘Because he was facing the chop and was helpless to do anything about it. I don’t believe there was a story.’
‘Did you like him?’
McCausland seemed thrown by the question. ‘My patience was sorely tried. I felt sorry for him but had no reason to dislike him.’
‘But you were about to fire him.’
‘He was about to fire himself. We’d bent over backwards. We even paid for him to dry out, but he was pissed before he got off the train back.’
Like Stevens, McCausland was surprised by the beauty of Warren’s wife, not surprised by the break-up of the marriage and totally unprepared for the circumstances of his death.
‘Always struck me as completely straight.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because he didn’t have the imagination to be anything else.’
Cross had the rest of the day to kill. There was still time to join Deidre. He sat in the car and flipped a coin. Heads he went. It came up heads. He did the best of three and got tails twice, and laughed at his childishness. Now that joining Deidre was out of the question, he didn’t feel like going home so he went back to Warren’s flat for want of anywhere else. He was curious about Warren. Perhaps McCausland was right and his story was all fantasy. Cross decided he would like to prove him wrong.
He made himself a cup of milkless tea and took it into Warren’s living room. He was more thorough than he had been that morning. He moved furniture and looked under carpets. Before he was finished it was getting dark and he had to turn lights on.
Persistence eventually paid off. Lodged between the wall and the desk he found a screwed-up sheet of carbon paper which Warren would have used to make a copy of his work. Cross smoothed the sheet out and excitement gave way to disappointment. The carbon was so used that it was indecipherable. Even if Warren had backed up his last story on to it, what he had written was lost in the maze of print.
Cross was about to throw the sheet away when his eye was drawn to the margin, where there were some notes added by hand. These were partly decipherable and among them he made out two names. The first was McKeague. The other was Heatherington.
Heatherington meant nothing. The name McKeague did. McKeague had been a notorious fanatic and founder of the Red Hand Commando, a loyalist death squad. His name had been connected with the Kincora boys’ home scandal that had caused a big stink when the story had broken in the papers some years before.
‘Oh, that old chestnut!’ said McCausland when Cross called him, on Warren’s phone, to ask if McKeague could have been part of Warren’s story.
McCausland made it plain from his tone that he did not welcome the interruption and s
ounded bored by Cross’s insistence. The story had been the subject of countless abortive editorial meetings.
‘There’d been rumours about this for donkeys’ years. Boys servicing local politicians and even boys being sent to England for the amusement of English MPs. No one has made it stand up.’
Cross remembered that when the scandal had broken the men in charge of the boys’ home were revealed to have loyalist paramilitary connections, hence the suggestion of a vice network involving local politicians. It was widely believed that a cover-up took place because British intelligence was blackmailing some of the politicians involved.
‘What do you think?’
McCausland sighed theatrically. ‘I know the boys in the home were being abused for years and the hardest thing was to get anyone to believe them. Any complaints made by them – dating back to God knows when – were ignored. And it’s probable that the men doing the abusing shared the boys with others, but not to the extent suggested. It was pretty small potatoes, a councillor here and there, but beyond that I would be very cautious. Talk to a dozen journalists and you’ll hear a dozen versions of the same story, adjusted to suit whoever’s telling it.’
‘And McKeague?’
‘He was named as a homosexual contact and a file on the allegations against him was being considered by the DPP when he was shot, either by his own men in the RHC or by the INLA, depending on who you want to believe.’
Either way, it struck Cross as oddly appropriate. The INLA was in many ways the republican mirror of the RHC. Both were highly unpredictable, given to feuding and operated on the outer limits of the sectarian conflict.
Something about McKeague nagged at the back of his mind until he remembered. ‘Wasn’t there a murder case?’
He could hear McCausland getting restless. ‘More your department than mine, I would have thought. Yes, there was. Nothing was proved and no charges were brought, but there was a suspicion that he had been responsible for the death of a ten-year-old boy whose burnt and cut-up body was found later by the Lagan.’
