Sacrifice of Fools

by Ian McDonald

  ‘Didn’t even rate a line in the news. But Big Maun Patterson was Divisional Commander, Third East Belfast Battalion UVF. Our Mr Gillespie has immaculate paramilitary connections.’

  ‘Gun-running?’

  ‘And they found out, and he silenced them and made it look like some Outsider feud. Except he doesn’t know enough about them to know that they can’t do a thing like that, according to our friend Mr Littlejohn here. You have to admit his timing’s, shall we say, intriguing? If not him, some UVF buddy of his. Contract killing.’

  ‘Down to the last kid,’ Willich says. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘It fits,’ Cochrane says. ‘Gillespie lives alone in a flat over on Eglantine Avenue, divorced from his wife shortly after he got out, two kids — wee girls; no evidence of any significant others. This is his first job since getting out. What was it you were saying, Dr Littlejohn? Single, unattached, human male, undersocialized, bit of a loner, on the edge of society? He’s got prime suspect written through like a stick of Portrush rock.’

  Willich leans against the wall. He looks out at the rain. He does the sigh again.

  ‘Here’s what we do. Get the lads out door to door, find if anyone saw anything; there’s a bloody hotel across the street, someone must have noticed something. We go for the gun-running approach, it’s the best we’ve got so far; Andy Gillespie is our prime suspect. Littlejohn, you come with me up to the morgue; Barbara might need your expertise, I don’t think she’s ever done a post mortem on an Outsider. We’ll haul Gillespie up there with us, officially to make an identification, if he can make anything out of what’s left. Unofficially, he might let something slip. I’ll prepare a press statement; we do not, repeat, not mention the mutilation of the bodies. I want everyone to know that like they know their kids’ birthdays, all right? They don’t even whisper it in their partner’s ear in the throes of passion. Complete silence on the mutilations. Every fucking nut case from here to Timbuktu is going to come out of the woodwork claiming responsibility once the news goes out. Are we right? Cochrane, send Rosh, Agnew, Crawford, any CID you can lay your hands on, in. This is a bloody fucking mess.’

  It’s not because he’s cold and wet and shocked numb that Andy Gillespie’s shivering. It’s this place, this morgue. This porcelain, these tiles; these cold cold reflections of himself, an infinite regress of pale ghosts. Everything clangs. Everything bangs. Everything echoes. And he doesn’t think he’ll ever get the stink of preservatives and cleaning fluids out of his sinuses.

  The seats are bloody narrow and hard. Everything aspires to the condition of the slab here.

  He knows they have suspicions about them. They’ll have checked him out. They’ll have opened up all his sins and failings and handed them round like a bad school report card amongst virgin aunts. Andy Gillespie; fucked up by thirty-five, well, that’s it. You get one shot and one shot only. Redemption? Change of life? New start? We don’t subscribe to those notions. Leopards, spots; mud, sticking; smoke, fire; those are the maxims we heed.

  In his teenage years, when too many of his friends had become Christians for the same reason that other friends started smoking — peer pressure — he had been hauled along by some recent converts to a wee meeting. Teenage Christianity seemed to be about little else than hauling yourself from one wee meeting to another, presumably so you wouldn’t have any idle time for sinful things, like smoking. There had been a talk — he’d learned there always was a talk, and a lot of singing, and not much else — on the Will of God. The speaker had impressed Andy Gillespie, for he was that rarity in Christian meeting society: a man of genuine spiritual insight. Most people think of God’s will as a mountain, the speaker said; a big sharp ridge, like the side of the Matterhorn, and if you wander you will fall off and be lost, and it’s a constant struggle to stay on that sharp ridge against the gales and buffetings of the world. But God’s will is not like that at all. God’s will is a valley with many ways through it, and if you wander too wide the steepness of the way will take you back on to easier paths.

  The valley and the mountain. Yeah. Andy Gillespie’s trying to live his life like a valley, following the flow down to the sea. Too many others are pushing up the side of the mountain, clinging to the sheer rocks, waiting for the slip and the big fall when the rope won’t hold them.

  They think I did it. They think I blew their heads apart like a dropped egg, Muskravhat and Seyoura and Senkajou and little Seyamang and Vrenanka. They think I did that thing with the knife on their bodies. That bitch in the beige coat who didn’t say one word to me as she drove me up here; that thin bastard with the look that says I know who you are, I know what you are, that wee girl with the gym gear under her coat; that big DCI bastard who looks like a Russian president with a vodka problem; even Littlejohn, they’re waiting for that one little slip, and they’ll cut the rope.

  They send the bitch in the beige coat for him.

  ‘Whenever you’re ready, Mr Gillespie.’

  Someone has opened the big meat larders and slid them out; he’s glad of that, he doesn’t want to have to hear five sets of chromium runners squeak and clack to a halt.

  ‘All right?’ the pathologist woman asks. Gillespie nods. She pulls back the first sheet. Gillespie closes his eyes. It’s too close; there’s nowhere he can look away from what has been done. The dead Shian is thrusting its wounds in his face, like Jesus on a crucifix: look at me, look at what they’ve done to me.

  ‘Can you identify it?’ the woman asks.

  The DCI and his DS and Little Miss Reebok Shorts and Littlejohn are smiling to themselves. Gillespie fixes Littlejohn’s eye. He bends to the corpse’s hand, licks the palm.

  ‘Senkajou Harridi.’

  You’re not looking so fucking pleased with yourselves now, are you?

  The Work-out Queen’s expression says she might suddenly boke.

  He goes to the second trolley, licks the second corpse’s palm.

  ‘Seyoura Harridi.’

  He doesn’t need to identify the third, but he does it anyway.

  ‘Muskravhat Harridi.’

  To the end, then. He goes to the first of the smaller mounds of white sheeting, pulls a spider-thin arm free, presses tongue to palm.

  ‘Vrenanka Harridi.’

  And the last.

  ‘Seyamang Harridi.’

  Little Miss Cycle Shorts is losing her weightwatcher’s dinner in the wash-hand basin by the door.

  ‘Take him down to the Pass,’ the big boozy DCI says, shaking with fury and outrage. ‘There’s things we want to know from you, chummy.’

  There’s a leaking sprinkler in the corridor outside Interview Room number two. Andy Gillespie can clearly hear it through the heavy wooden door. If it doesn’t keep the sound of a drip out, what hope when they start in with the riot batons? ‘Romper Room’, they used to call it. That was the good old bad old days, though. They have Amnesty International breathing garlic and macrobiotic yoghurt down their collars now; they need subtler methods. Psychological methods. Like the drip drip drip drip drip of a leaking sprinkler on the floor. Chinese water torture. And in the chair across the table from you is Dr Robert Fucking Littlejohn, xenologist. Wanker.

  At least the Romper Room was quick.

  ‘Interview with Andrew Gillespie commenced 00:15 Tuesday March the third, 2004. DS Roisin Dunbar in attendance, also Dr Robert Littlejohn in a consultancy role.’

  Down go the buttons. On goes the red record light. Same as it ever was, Andy.

  ‘I haven’t had my cup of tea yet. I’m gagging.’

  DS Roisin Dunbar sighs. She doesn’t do it very well. Gillespie thinks about telling her this, decides against it because she does genuinely look tired, greasy, creased. Her make-up is flaking.

  ‘Look, Mr Gillespie, I’ve got a kiddie, a wee six-month baby. I’d kind of like to get back home to see her some time tonight.’

  ‘I’ve two girls myself, Stacey and Talya. I’d show you their photographs except you’ve taken my wallet. I always fan
cied a boy, but you get what you get, what else can you do but be happy with them?’

  ‘Mr Gillespie, let’s go over this one more time. You state that you left the Welcome Centre at twenty past six.’

  ‘I remember the time was on the alarm system. There’ve been a lot of break-ins in the offices of University Street recently; I think it was a Crime Prevention Officer from here told us we should put the alarm on even if we’re leaving the place unattached for just a wee while.’

  ‘But the Harridis were upstairs.’

  ‘Yes. I was going back there later. They’d arranged a wee hooley because I’d helped a client of theirs in the magistrate’s court. It’ll be in the court records.’

  ‘That’s not in question. It’s what you said you did between leaving the centre and returning there at eight thirty.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I went to eat at the Denim Diner on Botanic Avenue. They’ll remember me, I made a fuss about the table. I had lasagne and chips, two pints of Harp, a wodge of banoffee and a coffee. Banoffee, coffee, heh? Then I bought two six-packs of Guinness from the offie at Botanic Station — the time is on the receipt — then I bought soluble aspirins from the Spar on the other side of the station, the all-nighter. I don’t have the receipt for that, should I have kept it? Then, because I was early, I took a longer way back and found you guys at the Welcome Centre. You know this. This is the fourth time I’ve told you it without any self-contradictions or holes in the story.’

  ‘But no alibi.’

  ‘Do I need one?’

  ‘Ongserrang Huskravidi, who arrived at the Centre for a seven-thirty appointment, found both the front door and the office door open. The alarm was switched off. How do you explain that?’

  ‘The bodies were in the office. Maybe they’d switched it off when they came downstairs.’

  ‘But the outside door, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘But if I did it, which you think I did, Ms Dunbar, then why the fuck did I come back with twelve cans of Guinness and a bag of aspirins?’

  ‘Why indeed, Mr Gillespie?’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake! Can we have a proper police officer in here? Look, instead of trying to pin a multiple murder on me just because I’ve a bit of form and some dodgy friends in my last life, you should be using me to help you. Jesus God, there is some seriously sick fuck out there who has blown five Shian to pieces and cut them up, and you need all the help you can get because you don’t have the first clue about how to deal with Outsiders. Littlejohn here’s as much use as tits on a boar; you need someone who knows the language, who knows the people, who can work at street level. What you’re forgetting is, these weren’t just any old bunch of weird Sheenies; they gave me a chance, they trusted me, they were my friends, and I want whoever did it caught and fucked right up the ass.’

  ‘You use the word “fuck” very easily, very comfortably, Andy,’ Littlejohn says. ‘Fuck this, fuck that, fuck it up the ass. But there are other words you have difficulty saying. The word “mutilated”. The word “genitals”. The words “sex organs”, or “penis”, or “vagina”. Do you not feel as comfortable with those words as you do with fuck?’

  ‘Hey hey hey hey, what’s going on here?’

  ‘I’m curious about how you come to be working for the Welcome Centre. I think I can safely say that you must be the only member of your generation on the Woodstock Road that’s given up fixing cars for Shian-human mediation and translation services.’

  ‘Like they said about Elvis, good career move. Aren’t we supposed to be an opportunity culture, finding out wee gaps in the market, squeezing ourselves in, making money?’

  ‘Yes, but why this opportunity?’

  - I learned the language, I wanted to do something with it, Gillespie says in Narha.

  - In jail, Littlejohn replied.

  - In jail, Gillespie answers.

  ‘Could we keep this to English, please?’ Roisin Dunbar says. The verbal warriors eyeball each other across the table.

  - If Dr Littlejohn’s Narha isn’t up to it, Gillespie says in a very difficult sexual innuendo mode with phallic connotations. He repeats it for Dunbar’s benefit in cold English.

  ‘Your Narha is beyond reproach,’ Littlejohn says. ‘It’s your English lets you down with the odd significant slip. When you were talking about your children to Sergeant Dunbar, you said, “I always fancied a boy”. Do you?’

  ‘Jesus God, you think I’m one of these pervs gets off on Shian because they remind them of men, or women, or kids, or something?’

  ‘You’d be amazed, Mr Gillespie, the lengths paedophiles go to to get to work with children.’

  ‘You are trying to make me out to be something I’m not, some kind of perverted psycho killer. I work — I worked — with the Shian because I wanted to.’

  ‘Well, that’s not good enough. Why did you want to?’

  ‘It’s something I had to do. Something I had to put right. Something I owed them.’

  ‘What?’

  Gillespie looks at the table top.

  ‘What?’

  Gillespie looks at the turning spindles on the tape machine.

  ‘What did you owe them?’

  Gillespie listens to the flat drip of water in the corridor. He won’t tell them. They can keep him here all night, as long as the law lets them hold him without charge, but he won’t tell them about the thing in the Maze. It’s his, all his. They don’t deserve to know it. This is one piece of his life he won’t let them unfold and pass around and snigger over. He sits. The tape winds. The sprinkler drips.

  At last Littlejohn speaks.

  ‘One last thing, Andy.’

  ‘Don’t you ever fucking call me that. Ever.’

  Littlejohn manages a sick smile. ‘If that’s what you want. Let’s go back to the trouble you had talking about the mutilation of the sex organs. Look, you’re squirming in your seat at the mention of it. Why do you find it difficult to talk about?’

  ‘It makes me sick, what that bastard did to them.’

  ‘I noticed an odd thing, did you notice it too? The children, they’d been left intact.’

  ‘Yes,’ Gillespie hisses. ‘I know.’

  ‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’

  ‘Yes. It’s strange.’

  ‘Why is it strange?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Someone comes in, blows their heads up like grenades with five maser shots, then gets out a hunting knife, goes to the bodies of the adults, cuts out the men’s penises and testicles, cuts out the female’s vagina, womb and ovaries, puts them against the wall and incinerates them with the maser, but leaves the kids. Why leave the kids? Why not cut them up, make a perfect job?’

  ‘Will you shut the fuck up about—’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About fucking mutilations.’

  ‘Why? Why, Andy? Tell me, what is it you find so hard about this?’

  ‘Because they were my fucking family!’ he shouts. And he’s calm. He’s cool. He’s all right. He’s all right. ‘And I told you never, ever to call me Andy. You know why the kids weren’t cut up as well as I do. Because they weren’t adult. They weren’t mature. Hell, they didn’t even have a sex; Shian kids don’t become male or female until puberty. They’re just kids. You know that, Littlejohn.’

  ‘And you know it. And so, it seems, does the killer.’

  The soft hum of the tape machine changes pitch as leadertape runs over the heads and the cassette comes to an end. Drip, says the sprinkler. Dunbar turns the tape over, carefully noting times and durations. They check these things rigorously in this age of Joint Authority.

  ‘Your work with the Welcome Centre must have brought you into contact with all aspects of Shian society in Ireland,’ Roisin Dunbar ventures.

  ‘What are you trying now?’ Gillespie can hear the weariness in his voice and hates it.

  ‘I’m sure you’d have encountered all kinds of strange Shian technology.’

  ‘Oh, I get it. You re
ally should leave this to Littlejohn; he throws you a curved ball. You, straight down the middle. I can see where you’re coming from. Shian technology, meaning weapons? Like masers? Look, I do translation work, I offer a mediation service, like if some employer wants to know why his Shian staff want five weeks’ holiday, or why all the men turn funny and aggressive twice a year when they come into contact with a Shian male employee, or if some poor bastard Outsider is up in court without a fucking clue what’s going on, like I was doing this afternoon. I do know a lot of people, human and otherwise, I do have a lot of contacts; none of them are UVF, UFF, Red Hand Commando, UDA, Ulster Young Militants, Free Men of Ulster, Protestant Action Force, Militant Orange Order, which is MOO and just about the most fucking stupid name for a bunch of loyalist wankers I have ever heard. I don’t know, I don’t care. I’m done with all that. I am certainly not running Shian weapon systems to Loyalist paramilitaries. Jesus Christ, these guys are psychopaths. You want to find the killer, try them. Fucking wired to the moon on this insane Holy Ulster bullshit and Nazi Master Race stuff. They think they’re the Lost Tribe of Israel. Outsiders, Shian? They’d be queuing up to drop the gas pellets on the lot of them.’

  A knock, the door opens a crack. Willich puts his head in, beckons Dunbar into the corridor with a twitch of his eyebrows.

  ‘Result?’

  ‘It would be a hell of a lot easier without Littlejohn there. He keeps changing my tack; he goes off into all this psycho-killer profile stuff, trying to trick Gillespie into slipping up and confessing that he did it.’

  ‘Gillespie?’

  ‘He has a chip on his shoulder about everything. He protesteth much.’

  ‘His kind always do. Protesteth too much?’

  ‘Hard to tell. He’s as dodgy as a nine bob note, boss. But he’s not going to give us anything, even with Littlejohn rattling his cage.’

  ‘He give you anything on this weapon-smuggling line?’

  ‘He protesteth mightily much about that too. You still think it’s the way to go?’

  ‘It’s the best we’ve got. This is Ulster, we only have two tricks, the orange one and the green one. Even our crime has to be Unionist or Nationalist. Everywhere else has proper, ordinary murders for good, old-fashioned, classical reasons. Not this place. So why should killing a bunch of Outsiders be any different? No, we’ll go with the gun-running angle. But a wee word: don’t push Gillespie too hard. There’s a whole operation out there; if we charge him, they’ll vanish. Give him about another ten minutes, then let him go. We’ll stick twenty-four-hour surveillance on him, see where he goes, what he does, who he talks to.’